Daily Archives: January 12, 2021

News: GM targets delivery companies with new EV business unit BrightDrop

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GM has launched a new business unit to offer commercial customers — starting with FedEx — an ecosystem of electric and connected products, the latest effort in the company’s ambitious $27 billion bid to become a leading electric automaker. The new business called BrightDrop, which officially launched Tuesday during the virtual 2021 CES, will begin

GM has launched a new business unit to offer commercial customers — starting with FedEx — an ecosystem of electric and connected products, the latest effort in the company’s ambitious $27 billion bid to become a leading electric automaker.

The new business called BrightDrop, which officially launched Tuesday during the virtual 2021 CES, will begin with two main products: an electric van called the EV600 with an estimate range of 250 miles and a pod-like electric pallet dubbed EP1. BrightDrop has other products in mind and is tinkering with a few concepts, including medium-distance vehicle that transports multiple electric pallets known as EP1 as well as a rapid load delivery vehicle concept, which was teased Tuesday.

This isn’t just a vehicle play, however. GM has also developed a suite of software tools to offer an EV ecosystem for the commercial marketplace. It’s also setting up a dealership network to support sales and service and plans to help commercial customers set up charging infrastructure.

The cloud-based software platform, which can be accessed on the web or by mobile app, will give users information to improve operations, including the best delivery routes and other fleet management features, according to GM. The electric van and pallet will have an array of connected features designed to give customers better ways to monitor and manage the vehicles, including location monitoring, battery status and remote commands to lock and unlock. 

BrightDrop is the latest “startup” to spin out of the automaker’s Global Innovation effort, an in-house organization that has led to the launch of OnStar Insurance, OnStar Guardian and GM Defense. Travis Katz, who was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Redpoint Ventures, has been named CEO and president of BrightDrop. 

The idea for BrightDrop was sparked by a team within the Global Innovation organization that was evaluating the growth of e-commerce and consumer demand for online delivery, which has been exacerbated by COVID-19.

“The more we learned about the demand and the challenges of delivery and logistics from that first mile to literally the last five feet, the more we saw the opportunity to leverage GM’s expertise in things like electrification, mobility applications, telematics, fleet management to help businesses move goods and services in a smarter and more sustainable way,” Pam Fletcher, vice president of Global Innovation at General Motors, said in a media briefing ahead of the announcement.

That opportunity is a substantial one, based on GM’s estimates. The automaker said that by 2025, the combined market opportunity for parcel, food delivery and reverse logistics in the U.S. will be more than $850 billion. Demand for urban last-mile delivery is expected to grow by 78% by 2030, leading to a 36% increase in delivery vehicles in the world’s top 100 cities, according to the World Economic Forum. At the same time, this increase in demand is expected to cause delivery-related carbon emissions to rise by nearly one-third.

The EP1

The business unit’s first product is called the EP1, a propulsion-assisted, electric pallet developed to move goods over short distances. For instance, it might be used to shuttle goods from a warehouse to a delivery van. The pod will be available in early 2021.

The EP1 has a built-in electric hub motor that can travel up to 3 miles per hour. The pod’s speed will adjust depending on the operator’s walking pace.

The EP1, which GM says it’s designed to maneuver in tight spaces, can about 23 cubic feet of cargo space and carry a payload of up to 200 pounds. Inside the pod are adjustable shelves and lockable cabinet doors to allow for remote access to whatever goods are being transported.

FedEx recently completed a pilot program testing the EP1. FedEx Express couriers were able to safely handle 25% more packages per day with the EP1s, according to GM.

BrightDrop and FedEx Express have another pilot scheduled to take place in a major urban center in the U.S. this quarter. 

The EV600

The electric delivery van is a vehicle designed and built off of GM’s Ultium architecture — the heart of the company’s EV strategy. The first vans will be delivered to FedEx at the end of this year. BrightDrop expects to make the EV600s available to more customers to order starting in early 2022.

The vehicle will be able to travel an estimated 250 miles on a single charge. Its peak charge rate will be up to 170 miles of EV range per hour via 120kW DC fast charging, according to GM.

The inside is roomy with 600 cubic feet of cargo area and comes with a security system to keep goods safe. There is a 13.4-inch-diagonal, full-color infotainment screen, front sliding pocket doors, wide cabin walkways and a large auto-open cargo bulkhead door.

 The electric van comes standard with advanced driver assistance tech found in its consumer vehicles, including front and rear park assist, automatic emergency braking and other warnings to keep the driver in the lane. The van also comes standard with a forward collision alert, following distance indicator, front pedestrian braking and  automatic high beams and HD Rear Vision Camera.

Customers can pump up the safety features and add options such as rear cross traffic braking, blind zone steering assist, reverse automatic braking, HD surround vision, rear pedestrian alert and enhanced automatic emergency braking.

News: Lantern is a startup looking to ignite a conversation about how to die well

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America is a land of paperwork, and nowhere is that more obvious than at the end of someone’s life. Advanced care directives have to be carefully disseminated to healthcare providers and strictly followed. Property has to be divided and transferred while meeting relevant estate laws. And of course, there are the logistics of a funeral,

America is a land of paperwork, and nowhere is that more obvious than at the end of someone’s life. Advanced care directives have to be carefully disseminated to healthcare providers and strictly followed. Property has to be divided and transferred while meeting relevant estate laws. And of course, there are the logistics of a funeral, cremation or other option that has its own serious complexities, costs and choices.

The worst time to figure out how to die is when you die. The best time to figure it out is precisely when you don’t have to.

For New York City-headquartered Lantern, the goal is to initiate those conversations early and give its users significantly better peace-of-mind, particularly in these dolorous times.

The company offers essentially a “how-to” platform for beginning to prepare for end-of-life, offering checklists and monitoring to ensure that the vast majority of details are figured out in advance. In some cases, the startup will handle the underlying details itself, while in other areas like estate planning, it works with partners such as Trust & Will, which we have profiled a number of times on TechCrunch.

Right now, the company has two plans: a simple free one and a $27 / year plan that tracks your progress on end-of-life planning and allows you to collaborate with family, friends or whoever else needs to be part of your decision-making. The company is in the process of adding other à la carte options for additional fees.

Last month, the company raised $1.4 million in a seed round led by Draper Associates with a few other firms involved. Earlier, the company raised a pre-seed round of $890,000 from the likes of 2048 Ventures, Amplify and others, bringing its total fundraised to date to $2.3 million. The company is organized as a public-benefit corporation and was founded in September 2018 and first launched a year later.

For founders Liz Eddy and Alyssa Ruderman, Lantern was an opportunity to tackle a looming problem in a compassionate and empathetic way. “I started my first company when I was 15,” Eddy, who is CEO, said. That company focused on dating abuse and domestic violence education for high school and later college students. “I really fell in love with the pace and variety of starting something new, but also in creating conversations around topics that people really don’t want to talk about and making it more palatable and comfortable,“ she said.

Later, she joined local suicide prevention non-profit Crisis Text Line, which has an SMS-based network of crisis counselors who are trained to calm people and begin their process of recovery. She spent more than six years at the organization.

As for Ruderman, who is COO of Lantern, she most recently spent two years at Global Citizen, a non-profit organization focused on ending extreme poverty. The two connected and incubated Lantern at startup accelerator Grand Central Tech.

The idea for better end-of-life planning came from personal experience. “I lost my dad when I was in elementary school,” Eddy said, “and saw firsthand how loss and grief impacts a family financially, emotionally, logistically, legally — every aspect.”

Today, many of these processes are offline, and the online products mostly available today are focused on individual elements of end-of-life planning, such as estate planning or selecting and purchasing a casket. Eddy and Ruderman saw an opportunity to provide a more holistic experience with a better product while also initiating these conversations earlier.

That pre-planning part of the product was launched just as the pandemic was getting underway last year, and Eddy said that “we had a sort of a really interesting launch where people were starting to come to terms with their own mortality in a way we hadn’t seen in a very long time.” Typical users so far have been between 25 and 35 years old, and many people start planning when they have a major life event. Eddy says that the death of a family member is an obvious trigger, but so is having a baby or starting a company.

One aspect that Eddy emphasized repeatedly was that having a will and pre-planning for end-of-life are not equivalent. “Even if you don’t have a dollar to your name after you pass away, there are a ton of other things that your loved ones, family members, whoever’s responsible has to consider,” she said.

From a product perspective, there are some nuances compared to your more typical SaaS startup. For one, the company needs to engage you regularly, but not too frequently. Unlike, say, a wedding which is a single event that then is over, your documents and directives need to be occasionally edited and updated as a user’s life circumstances change.

Beyond that, one of the largest challenges with a product that talks about death is building a connection with a user that doesn’t seem cold, and, well, Silicon Valley-like. “Even as a product that is entirely virtual, making sure that you really feel that human connection throughout” is a high priority, Eddy said. “We use a lot of empathetic language, and our imagery, all of the illustrations are done by illustrators who have lost someone in memory of the person who’s lost.”

Longevity startups may remain a thesis for some VC investors, but handling the end — no matter when — is an activity every person faces. Lantern might shine just a bit more light on what is otherwise a debilitating and scary prospect.

News: Cockroach Labs scores $160M Series E on $2B valuation

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Cockroach Labs, makers of CockroachDB, have been on a fundraising roll for the last couple of years. Today the company announced a $160 million Series E on a fat $2 billion valuation. The round comes just eight months after the startup raised an $86.6 million Series D. The latest investment was led by Altimeter Capital

Cockroach Labs, makers of CockroachDB, have been on a fundraising roll for the last couple of years. Today the company announced a $160 million Series E on a fat $2 billion valuation. The round comes just eight months after the startup raised an $86.6 million Series D.

The latest investment was led by Altimeter Capital with participation from new investors Greenoaks and Lone Pine along with existing investors Benchmark, Bond, FirstMark, GV, Index Ventures and Tiger Global. The round doubled the company’s previous valuation and increased the amount raised to $355 million.

Co-founder and CEO Spenser Kimball says that the company’s revenue more than doubled in 2020 in spite of COVID, and that caught the attention of investors. He attributed this paradoxical rise to the rapid shift to the cloud brought on by the pandemic that many people in the industry have seen.

“People became more aggressive with what was already underway, a real move to embrace the cloud to build the next generation of applications and services, and that’s really fundamentally where we are,” Kimball told me.

As that happened, the company began a shift in thinking. While it has embraced an open source version of CockroachDB along with a 30-day free trial on the company’s cloud service as ways to attract new customers to the top of the funnel, it wants to try a new approach.

In fact, it plans to replace the 30 day trial with a newer version later this year without any time limits. It believes this will attract more developers to the platform and enable them to see the full set of features without having to enter credit card information. What’s more, by taking this approach it should end up costing the company less money to support the free tier.

“What we expect is that you can do all kinds of things on that free tier. You can do a hackathon, any kind of hobby project […] or even a startup that has ambitions to be the next DoorDash or Airbnb,” he said. As he points out, there’s a point where early stage companies don’t have many users, and can remain in the free tier until they achieve product-market fit.

“That’s when they put a credit card down, and they can extend beyond the free tier threshold and pay for what they use,” he said. The newer free tier is still in the beta testing phase, but will be rolled out during this year.

Kimball says that company wasn’t necessarily looking to raise, although he knew that it would continue to need more cash on the balance sheet to run with giant competitors like Oracle, AWS and the other big cloud vendors, along with a slew of other database startups. As the company’s revenue grows, he certainly sees an IPO in its future, but he doesn’t see it happening this year.

The startup ended the year with 200 employees and Kimball expects to double that by the end of this year. He says growing a diverse group of employees takes good internal data and building a welcoming and inclusive culture.

“I think the starting point for anything you want to optimize in a business is to make sure that you have the metrics in front of you, and that you’re constantly looking at them […] in order to measure how you’re doing,” he explained.

He added, “The thing that we’re most focused on in terms of action is really building the culture of the company appropriately and that’s something we’ve been doing for all six years we’ve been around. To the extent that you have an inclusive environment where people actually really view the value of respect, that helps with diversity.”

Kimball says he sees a different approach to running the business when the pandemic ends with some small percentage going into the office regularly and others coming for quarterly visits, but he doesn’t see a full return to the office post-pandemic.

News: Uber and Moderna partner on COVID-19 vaccine access and information

• January 12, 2021
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Uber and pharmaceutical company Moderna have announced a partnership around COVID-19 vaccination, which will include a number of different initiatives. To start, it’s only confirmed component is to provide users with credible, factual information about COVID-19 vaccine safety through Uber’s consumer app, but the companies have also discussed additional “options” including building ride scheduling via

Uber and pharmaceutical company Moderna have announced a partnership around COVID-19 vaccination, which will include a number of different initiatives. To start, it’s only confirmed component is to provide users with credible, factual information about COVID-19 vaccine safety through Uber’s consumer app, but the companies have also discussed additional “options” including building ride scheduling via Uber directly into the immunization appointment booking process.

Still in its early days, the U.S. COVID-19 vaccination program is already beset with challenges, including providing timely access to vaccines to swaths of the population who need it most. The inoculation program also has to contend with significant misinformation proliferating on social media about vaccine safety, and any app with the surface area of something like Uber has a chance to get positive messages and accurate information in front of a lot of people, so that’s good news on its own.

But one of the very real challenges to an effective vaccination campaign remains logistical, and getting people to make their initial and follow-up appointments for the first round of the Moderna vaccine, and its second shot booster, is a bigger challenge than many might suspect. I spoke to Healthvana CEO Ramin Bastani about their work with  LA County on creating an immunization record that integrates with Apple Wallet to provide patients with timely info and reminders about vaccination appointments, but integrating a ride-booking service or appointment reminder directly in the Uber app that most users already have on their phone anyway could be another very effective way to increase success rates for first and follow-up inoculation visits.

Uber has already offered up free and discounted rides to help lower the friction of actually going out and getting a vaccine, but a product-level integration could do a lot more than that by providing easy, user-friendly access. As noted, this is still just one of the options being discussed, but if Uber and Moderna are willing to commit it to print, that at least means they’re serious about trying to find a way. We’re holding them to account, too, so rest assured we’ll follow up on their progress as this collaboration develops.

News: FTC settlement with Ever orders data and AIs deleted after facial recognition pivot

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The maker of a defunct cloud photo storage app that pivoted to selling facial recognition services has been ordered to delete user data and any algorithms trained on it, under the terms of an FTC settlement. The regulator investigated complaints the Ever app — which gained earlier notoriety for using dark patterns to spam users’

The maker of a defunct cloud photo storage app that pivoted to selling facial recognition services has been ordered to delete user data and any algorithms trained on it, under the terms of an FTC settlement.

The regulator investigated complaints the Ever app — which gained earlier notoriety for using dark patterns to spam users’ contacts — had applied facial recognition to users’ photographs without properly informing them what it was doing with their selfies.

Under the proposed settlement, Ever must delete photos and videos of users who deactivated their accounts and also delete all face embeddings (i.e. data related to facial features which can be used for facial recognition purposes) that it derived from photos of users who did not give express consent to such a use.

Moreover, it must delete any facial recognition models or algorithms developed with users’ photos or videos.

This full suite of deletion requirements — not just data but anything derived from it and trained off of it — is causing great excitement in legal and tech policy circles, with experts suggesting it could have implications for  other facial recognition software trained on data that wasn’t lawfully processed.

Or, to put it another way, tech giants that surreptitiously harvest data to train AIs could find their algorithms in hot water with the US regulator.

The quick background here is that the Ever app shut down last August, claiming it had been squeezed out of the market by increased competition from tech giants like Apple and Google.

However the move followed an investigation by NBC News — which in 2019 reported that app maker Everalbum had pivoted to selling facial recognition services to private companies, law enforcement and the military (using the brand name Paravision) — apparently repurposing people’s family snaps to train face reading AIs.

NBC reported Ever had only added a “brief reference” to the new use in its privacy policy after journalists contacted it to ask questions about the pivot in April of that year.

In a press release yesterday, reported earlier by The Verge, the FTC announced the proposed settlement with Ever received unanimous backing from commissioners.

One commissioner, Rohit Chopra, issued a standalone statement in which he warns that current gen facial recognition technology is “fundamentally flawed and reinforces harmful biases”, saying he supports “efforts to enact moratoria or otherwise severely restrict its use”.

“Until such time, it is critical that the FTC meaningfully enforce existing law to deprive wrongdoers of technologies they build through unlawful collection of Americans’ facial images and likenesses,” he adds.

Chopra’s statement highlights the fact that commissioners have previously voted to allow data protection law violators to retain algorithms and technologies that “derive much of their value from ill-gotten data”, as he puts it — flagging an earlier settlement with Google and YouTube under which the tech giant was allowed to retain algorithms and other technologies “enhanced by illegally obtained data on children”.

And he dubs the Ever decision “an important course correction”.

Ever has not been fined under the settlement — something Chopra describes as “unfortunate” (saying it’s related to commissioners “not having restated this precedent into a rule under Section 18 of the FTC Act”).

He also highlights the fact that Ever avoided processing the facial data of a subset of users in States which have laws against facial recognition and the processing of biometric data — citing that as an example of “why it’s important to maintain States’ authority to protect personal data”. (NB: Ever also avoided processing EU users’ biometric data; another region with data protection laws.)

“With the tsunami of data being collected on individuals, we need all hands on deck to keep these companies in check,” he goes on. “State and local governments have rightfully taken steps to enact bans, moratoria, and other restrictions on the use of these technologies. While special interests are actively lobbying for federal legislation to delete state data protection laws, it will be important for Congress to resist these efforts. Broad federal preemption would severely undercut this multifront approach and leave more consumers less protected.

“It will be critical for the Commission, the states, and regulators around the globe to pursue additional enforcement actions to hold accountable providers of facial recognition technology who make false accuracy claims and engage in unfair, discriminatory conduct.”

Paravision has been contacted for comment on the FTC settlement.

News: Air taxi startup Archer is partnering with automaker FCA on production of its electric aircraft

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Archer, a company that’s looking to develop an airline of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for sue in urban transport, will work with automaker Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) in a new partnership to benefit from the latter’s expertise in engineering, design, supply chain and materials science. Archer aims to start production of its

Archer, a company that’s looking to develop an airline of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for sue in urban transport, will work with automaker Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) in a new partnership to benefit from the latter’s expertise in engineering, design, supply chain and materials science. Archer aims to start production of its eVTOLs at scale beginning in 2023, with an initial unveiling to occur early this year.

The new team-up will see FCA provide input that contributes to the design of Archer’s eVTOL cockpit, as well, another area where the automaker has ample expertise, since it has designed spaces for drivers for many decades in its automotive business. Archer’s aircraft will be powered by an electric motor, and will be able to fly for up to 60 miles at top speeds of 150 mph. The Archer eVTOL is designed to be quiet and efficient, with efforts from the FCA collaboration going towards lowering the cost of its manufacturing to make high-volume manufacturing achievable and sustainable.

Ultimately, Archer is looking to FCA to help it realize efficiencies in its process that can make bringing its eVTOL to market a sound business that can also be accessed affordably by end users. Palo Alto-based Archer is looking to ultimately scale production to the point where it can produce “thousands” of its eVTOL aircraft per year, for use in future air taxi services serving cities globally.

Based in Palo Alto and led by co-founders Brett Adcock and Adam Goldstein, and including industry executives like Chief Engineer Goeff Bower, who previously served int hat role at Airbus’ Vahana eVTOL initiative, Archer launched out of stealth earlier this year with backing from Marc Lore, current President and CEO of Walmart’s ecommerce business (he was co-founder and CEO of Jet when it was acquired by the retailer).

News: From crypto trading and home workouts to EV batteries and microLED displays, CES’ Taiwan startups cover a wide range of tech

• January 12, 2021
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For the past three years, the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) has brought startups to CES . This year, its virtual pavilion, organized with Taiwan Tech Arena, is hosting 100 startups, organized into five categories: Smart Living, Tech for Good, Cybersecurity and Cloud, Healthcare and Wellness, and Mobility Tech. During two press events,

For the past three years, the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) has brought startups to CES . This year, its virtual pavilion, organized with Taiwan Tech Arena, is hosting 100 startups, organized into five categories: Smart Living, Tech for Good, Cybersecurity and Cloud, Healthcare and Wellness, and Mobility Tech. During two press events, 24 startups previewed their CES presentations, giving a sneak peek at what the pavilion will showcase.

In a press conference on Sunday, MOST’s head, Wu Tsung-tsong, said the pavilion’s goal is to help startups expand into more markets and find international investors. “Investing in Taiwanese startups means investing Taiwan,” he added.

Startups that presented during Taiwan Tech Arena’s press conference on Sunday:

All Good Energy provides an open platform for electric vehicle batteries that enables IoT functionality and constant communication with the cloud. This allows users to monitor battery performance and how much charge is left. Its open platform provides access to battery data through APIs and has been integrated into cargo fleets in Taiwan.

Aiphas says on average, nurses need to take care of nine patients at once, answering dozens of calls. The startup makes a smart ward solution, with a plug and play smart nurse call system called Aipha Call that helps them respond faster. Another feature, called Aipha-Eye, detects emergencies like fires or falls. The system can be deployed in five days. Aiphas has developed relationships with six top hospitals in Taiwan and is currently used in National Taiwan University Hospital’s Bei-Hu Branch.

Crypto-Arsenal is a cloud-based automatic crypto trading platform that lets users develop, backtest, simulate and live-trade their algorithmic trading strategies. To reduce trader risk, it uses smart contracts on the blockchain so traders only need to pay developers when they get profits. The platform is in public beta, with 700 users so far, who have made $10,000 USD in profit in three trading competitons. Crypto-Arsenal is partnered with National Taiwan University and sponsored by Binance, and will officially launch in the second quarter of 2021.

Koup makes performance wear with the aim of “circularity”—in other words, it uses recycled materials that can be recyled back into usable material in the future. Koup launched on Kickstarter with the Cinnamon shirt. Each one uses material from eight plastic bottles that is turned into pellets before being spun into fiber and cinnamon as a natural antimicrobial to eliminate order.

Uniigym provides an interactive fitness service with more than 1,000 fitness classes that can be streamed online, through smart TVs or internet set-top boxes, and community features. It offers two products: Uniihome, fitness classes for home workouts, and Uniicube, which creates virtual environments with a projector. Currently available in Taiwan, it will launch internationally this year.

Startups that previewed during a keynote on Tuesday

Mobility

3Drens is a data-driven IoT platform for commercial fleet owners, including logistics and vehicle rental. It enables asset management, preventative maintenace, driver behavior optimization and itinerary management. The platform is customizable and includes open data to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs.

GenkiTek offers driver monitoring system that can detect potential distractions like eating, drinking or phone calls and send alerts to companies and drivers to reduce accidents. It has collected hundreds of thousands of driver images to train its AI system’s deep neural net for analyzing driver behavior.

Dartrays’ WHUD II is a windshield HUD (heads up display) with a patented optical path design. It can project images up to two to three meters, and is small enough to be installed as an after-market device. It projects information to help drivers see information without taking their eyes off the road.

Spatial Topology Technology develops location tech for mobile. It claims to have the largest map pool for indoor positioning in the e-commerce industry. Its solutions help brands develop their offline-to-online strategies, since many people go window shopping offline, checking out products before buying them online. The platform analyzes repeating customer behavior and includes brand engagement tools like geotargeted reward programs.

Health care and wellness

CloudMed makes iCare, an 8-in-1 sensor that can detect eight biometrics, including body age, heart rate, pulse wave transit time, dialostic and systolic blood pressure, oxygen saturation and tiredness and stress levels, using PPG optical sensors and ECG electrodes.

OFLO is a cloud-based walkie-talkie created for frontline workers that can’t look at screens while doing their jobs. OFLO is what the company describes as the world’s first dual-bone conduction wearable device, and unlike traditional walkie talkies, covers longer distances, has unlimited channels and is connected to software with auto-logging, transcription and cross-platform communication features.

Pulxion is a “personalized mobile hospital” that detects the warning signs of strokes. Meant as a first-line screening device for patients, it uses motion analysis, monitors pulses and performs neck scans to gauge a user’s risk of stroke.

Cybersecurity and Cloud Solutions

ArcRan’s iSecV box is a vehicle-to-everything (V2X) cybersecurity solution that monitors radio frequency signals, including WiFi, Zigbee, cellular V2X and dedicated short-range communicaitons to detect abnormal behavior. It gives warnings if anything is amiss, and is meant to make smart cities safer without affecting existing infrastructure.

Avalanche Computing offers a performance-optimized workflow for AI experts at SMEs, helping them redesign algorithms and deploy AI models. It can train AI models in parallel or distributed models on multiple GPUs.

I.X R2’s product is a wireless secure ebadge with a cryptokey inside, combining physical keys and software. The 3-in-1 badge features log-in authentication, data encryption and door entrance. Users own their cryptokeys, so they can manage door entrances and security with one platform.

Tresl is an e-commerce analytics platforms for brands on Shopify, designed to give them the same kind of insight as larger retailers so they can increase repeat revenue. It features pre-built segmentation and actionable insights.

Tech for Good

Ganzin is an AI-based eye tracking solution for integration into AR/VR devices and smart glasses. The lightweight, compact module is powered by Qualcomm XR or Ganzin’s in-house processor.

NUWA Robotics Platform’s Kebbi Air is an AI-based social robot that comes with a development platform to let brands create interactive content for it. Aimed at kids, it is currently used in 600 schools in Taiwan for STEAM and language education. The robot recognizes faces, objects, gestures, sound sources, voice and environmental context.

PlayNitride’s micro LED displays boosts 60% transparency and can be used for automotive displays, wearable devices and monitors.

Honeywld’s MyGuardian is a wearable for automated fall alerts. It is meant to help nurses and personal assistants working with elderly people in nursing homes, care centers or hospitals provide 24-hour monitoring.

Smart Living

FiduciaEdge helps smart cities keep data private by enhancing the security level of edge devices. Use cases include smart city transportation systems and manufacturing.

Eleclean‘s Share disinfectant devices feature replaceable bottles that turn water into disinfectant with hydrogen peroxide and hydroxl radicals. The bottles are paired with an intelligent control base and has built-in NFC so users can check the disinfectant’s expiration date or how many times it can still be used by scanning it with a smartphone app.

Goama allows developers to integrate casual e-sport games into their apps to boost engagement, reduce customer acquisition costs and increase brand awareness.

Interxie creates energy storage systems for homes that integrates with new or existing renewable energy systems to manage power, avoid outages and adjust energy power usage. It can also help reduce energy costs by integrating with battery systems.

News: Jedox raises over $100M to expand its financial modeling and analytics software to more verticals

• January 12, 2021
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Organizations today — perhaps more than ever before — are relying on technology to help them figure out what the next weeks, months, and years will hold for their business at what has been one of the more tumultuous periods for our global economy in decades. Today, a company that is providing the platform to

Organizations today — perhaps more than ever before — are relying on technology to help them figure out what the next weeks, months, and years will hold for their business at what has been one of the more tumultuous periods for our global economy in decades. Today, a company that is providing the platform to do that is announcing a significant fundraise to tap into that opportunity.

Jedox, a German startup that builds tools to help companies with their financial planning and analysis using data sourced from basic documents like Excel spreadsheets, has picked up a funding of over $100 million — it’s not specifying exactly how much — in a round being led by Insight Partners, with Iris Capital, eCAPITAL, and Wecken & Cie (all previous backers) also participating. The company currently works with some 2,500 customers including big players like Microsoft, McDonalds, and industrial giant ABB.

The company’s software was originally built to work on-premises or in the cloud, and mainly oriented towards financial planners. Over the last several years, Jedox has expanded that to a wider set of adjacent users, specifically in HR planning and procurement, and the plan with this funding is to expand Jedox’s applicability into an even wider set of use-cases and verticals. CEO Florian Winterstein — who joined the company in 2018 during its last fundraise — said that while Jedox the name doesn’t have any particular meaning, the company has landed on a focus on the “X”.

“We want to focus on more than just the finance department,” he said, and the company thinks of FPNA (financial planning and analysis) “as XPNA” as a result. Expanding beyond their original verticals “is what everyone in enterprise is doing right now.”

The company has raised around $150 million to date, and Winterstein said that Jedox is not disclosing its valuation with this round. But he confirmed that Insight took a majority investment, and that this funding comes on the heels of a lot of demand from financial and strategic investors to back the company. The company counts Microsoft and Salesforce (prolific strategic investors in the startup world) among its partners and sometime customers today — as well as acquisition offers from enterprise resource planning companies due to its traction and presence in the market.

“We have been approached tons of times, maybe every month, by companies from our space, from others in the area of financial services, and those looking for better tools to integrate into a wider suite of enterprise services,” he said. He called those approaches “interesting” but also said the startup was equally considering an IPO route in several years — the route that its closest competitor, Anaplan, has taken, he points out. In any case, there are no plans for an exit anytime soon with growth going strong.

Jedox got its start way back in 2002 and in a way is a very typical European startup story. Winterstein notes that its efforts were all open source-based and that the company was “not commercial at all, a lot of tech geeks and German engineering types that were not overly experienced in go-to-market strategies.”

That started to change over time, with Winterstein coming in and the founders stepping away, and the company also making its own shift, away from the open source model among the many changes that have taken place. (The open source elements, however, as still alive and well, collected mostly around the Palo open source standard.) Jedox, Winterstein, is all-in in cloud services now, with SaaS making up 75% of its revenues, and the remainder mostly being about professional services related to that.

(The focus on professional services ushered by Winterstein is notable, considering his track record. Before this role, he led and founded a number of companies, two of which have been acquired by IBM, which arguably leads and dominates the market of building tech with professional services wrapped around it.)

For a lot of tech watchers and especially those in enterprise, these days when people talk about modelling, thoughts often spring immediately to artificial intelligence and things like big data machine learning, and that’s not too much of a surprise: AI is really the flavor of the month at the moment.

A lot of that, however, can be misleading. I’ve heard more than one tech person complain about how a lot of what is pitched and peddled as AI is not really that.

What’s quite refreshing is the Jedox does not try do that itself.

“I get kind of annoyed by ‘what is AI’,” he said when I brought this up. “It may be simple predictions and statistical modeling they are doing.” He is quick to say that “not everything we do is AI, and if you look at our customer distribution, roughly 100 of our 2,500 customers are really using AI. Others are using what others may call AI but in the definition of what AI actually is, it is not.”

He said that Jedox is not without AI in its systems for modeling and giving a better picture of what might happen at a business when considering different factors, but that Jedox does not in all cases develop those algorithms itself.

“There are around 20-25 algorithms out there and we don’t think it’s necessary to create the next algorithm,” he said. Instead, the company taps AI services provided by the likes of Google, Microsoft and others to run its services on a backbone, built by Jedox, “that throws user or customer data on various AI services and our backbone to figure out which algorithm suits the data and use case of the customer best.”

Companies like Palantir have really brought to light how modeling and predictive insights can be used to an organization’s advantage. Jedox’s unique selling point is that it’s doing something like this but on a more actionable basis for average workers.

“Jedox offers a differentiated approach to financial planning through its flexibility, familiar Excel-based interface and focus on the customer,” said Jeff Lieberman, MD at Insight Partners, in a statement. “We are excited to partner with Florian and the Jedox team to bring market-leading cloud planning tools to industry leaders in every vertical, across the globe.” Rachel Geller, another MD at Insight Partners, and Henry Frankievich, principal, will be joining the board of directors with the round.

News: Programmable genetics gets more cash as Tessera Therapeutics gets a $230 million infusion

• January 12, 2021
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Technologists are getting better at coding biology and venture firms are flooding a new generation of startups with cash so that they can commercialize their technology bringing in the next wave of genetic innovation. Tessera Therapeutics, the Boston-based spinup from Flagship Pioneering, is the latest company to enter the mix with $230 million in new

Technologists are getting better at coding biology and venture firms are flooding a new generation of startups with cash so that they can commercialize their technology bringing in the next wave of genetic innovation.

Tessera Therapeutics, the Boston-based spinup from Flagship Pioneering, is the latest company to enter the mix with $230 million in new financing to build up its platform for better biological programming.

The round was led by Alaska Permanent Fund Corp., Altitude Life Science Ventures and the second SoftBank Vision Fund, with participation from the Qatari Investment Authority and other undisclosed investors.

Last year, the company took the covers off of its gene writing service, which combined an array of different gene editing, manufacturing and synthesizing technologies to provide more tailored therapeutic instructions to genetic code.

By providing more instructions to genetic material, the company aims to increase the precision of therapies while expanding the number of potential pathogens or mutations they can target, the company said in a statement.

The thesis is similar to the approach taken by companies like Senti Bio, another early stage biotech company which raised $105 million earlier this month.

“The ability to write in the code of life will be a defining technology of this century and drive a fundamental change in medicine. Today’s support is a testament to Tessera’s outstanding team of scientists and our focus on bringing the extraordinary promise of Gene Writing to patients,” said Geoffrey von Maltzahn, CEO and Co-Founder of Tessera Therapeutics, and a partner at Flagship Pioneering. “We look forward to turning this powerful technology into a new category of medicines.”

Part of a number of companies focused on gene therapies and gene editing technologies that have been developed under the Flagship Pioneering umbrella, Tessera Therapeutics focuses on the development of new therapies that will use messenger RNA, targeted fusogenic vectors, and epitgenetic controllers, according to Flagship Pioneering founder and chief executive, Noubar Afeyan, who also serves as the chair and co-founder of Tessera.

While Senti Bio is adding more programming to existing genetic material, Tessera uses mobile genetic elements, the most abundant genetic material in the body to create new vectors for writing and rewriting the human genome.

The company asserts that this represents a breakthrough in genetic engineering, that can build better therapies. That’s because the technology can target very specific sites in the genome to make any substitutions, insertions or deletions in genetic code. Tessera also said that its tech allows for more efficient engineering of somatic cell genomes without double stranded-breaks and with very little reliance on DNA repair pathways.

Gene Writing is inspired by and builds upon the shoulders of nature’s most prevalent class of genes: mobile genetic elements. Tessera’s computational and high-throughput laboratory platform has enabled the team to design, build, and test thousands of engineered and synthetic mobile genetic elements for writing and rewriting the human genome.

The company said it can also write entirely new sequences into the genome by delivering only RNA.

With the new round of funding, Tessera said it would look to further develop its tech, hire more staff and establish manufacturing and automation capabilities critical for its platform and programs.

News: UK tests ‘Space Tug’ capable of refiring its engine several times in orbit, and collecting space junk

• January 12, 2021
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UK SpaceTech startup Skyrora is currently the only private company capable of launching rockets from UK soil. On Christmas Eve at its testing facility in Fife, Scotland, the team performed a third-stage static fire engine test onboard a new vehicle that will ultimately carry satellites to their final destination. But what’s more interesting is that

UK SpaceTech startup Skyrora is currently the only private company capable of launching rockets from UK soil. On Christmas Eve at its testing facility in Fife, Scotland, the team performed a third-stage static fire engine test onboard a new vehicle that will ultimately carry satellites to their final destination. But what’s more interesting is that the vehicle can refire it’s engine several times in orbit and conduct multiple missions in a single trip. This makes it a “Space Tug” able to perform a number of maneuvers in space including the extraction of space junk or maintenance if are satellites already in orbit.

Skyrora went rough one of the early Space Camp accelerator programme from Seraphim Capital.

The Space Tug is the first “mission ready” vehicle of its kind to be developed in the UK and once in orbit it can navigate to any location under its own power, with the ability to make multiple stops etc.

The Space Tug is powered by a 3D-printed 3.5kN engine and the first stage of is launch is fueled using an eco-friendly fuel (Ecosene) made in part from waste plastics

Volodymyr Levykin, CEO Skyrora commented: “We have been deliberately quiet about this aspect of our Skyrora XL launch vehicle as we had huge technical challenges to get it to this stage and we wanted to ensure all tests had a satisfactory outcome, which they now have. With the current climate and a real shortage of good news, we feel it is the right time to share this with the world… We aim not only to conduct efficient launches from UK soil in the most environmentally friendly way, but then also to ensure that each single launch mission has the possibility of conducting the level of work that would have historically taken multiple launches.”

Sir Tim Peake, Astronaut, commented: “It’s fantastic that companies such as Skyrora are persisting in their ambition to make the UK a “launch state”. By driving forward and constantly investing into their engineering capabilities, the UK continues to benefit from these impressive milestones achieved. In undertaking a full fire test of their third stage, which fulfils the function of an Orbital Manoeuvring Vehicle capable of delivering satellites into precision orbits, Skyrora is one step closer to launch readiness. This vehicle will also be able to perform vital services such as satellite removal, refuelling and replacement and debris removal from orbit.”