Monthly Archives: February 2021

News: Facebook says it will remove more COVID-19 conspiracies that discourage vaccination

• February 8, 2021
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Vaccine misinformation has been around since well before the pandemic, but ensuring that anti-scientific conspiracies don’t get boosted online is more crucial than ever as the world races against the spread of a deadly, changing virus. Now, Facebook says it will expand the criteria it uses to take down false vaccine claims. Under the new

Vaccine misinformation has been around since well before the pandemic, but ensuring that anti-scientific conspiracies don’t get boosted online is more crucial than ever as the world races against the spread of a deadly, changing virus.

Now, Facebook says it will expand the criteria it uses to take down false vaccine claims. Under the new rules, which Facebook said it made in consultation with groups like the World Health Organization, the company will remove posts claiming that COVID-19 vaccines aren’t effective, that it’s “safer to get the disease” and the widely debunked longstanding anti-vaxxer claim that vaccines could cause autism.

Facebook says it will place a “particular focus” on enforcement against groups, Pages, groups and accounts that break the rules, noting that they may be removed from the platform outright.

Facebook took steps to limit COVID-19 vaccine misinformation in December, preparing the platform for the vaccine rollout while still lagging well behind the rampant spread of anti-vaccine claims. The company began removing posts containing some misinformation about the vaccine, including “false claims that COVID-19 vaccines contain microchips” and content claiming that the vaccine is being tested on portions of the population without their consent.

Why this kind of stuff didn’t already fall under Facebook’s rules against COVID-19 misinformation is anyone’s guess. The company came out of the gate early in the pandemic with a new set of policies intended to prevent an explosion of potentially deadly COVID-related conspiracies, but time and time again the company fails to evenly and firmly enforce its own rules.

News: Blair launches $100M facility to fund ISAs for students

• February 8, 2021
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Income-share agreements or ISAs have been gathering force as an alternative financial model for students, particularly at non-traditional schools like coding boot camps and trade schools. We’ve done some pretty deep dives into the space over the years in terms of how these loan products incentivize students and colleges to work together for better professional

Income-share agreements or ISAs have been gathering force as an alternative financial model for students, particularly at non-traditional schools like coding boot camps and trade schools. We’ve done some pretty deep dives into the space over the years in terms of how these loan products incentivize students and colleges to work together for better professional outcomes. Given their novelty though, one of the largest barriers to wide adoption remains the lack of capital for these models.

That’s starting to change, and companies like Blair are leading the charge.

Blair told TechCrunch that it has raised $100 million in a new debt facility to fund what it is dubbing “Blair Capital” to fund ISAs at partner institutions. The money came from an undisclosed investor, which was described by Blair CEO Mike Mahlkow as an “institutional capital partner with more than $10 billion under management.”

My colleague Mike Butcher first profiled Blair when it was coming out of YC back in summer 2019. When Blair first got started by co-founders Mahlkow, Constantin Schreiber, and David Nordhausen, it was focused exclusively on the direct-to-consumer market for ISAs. The idea was that students would go to Blair and secure an ISA with a set amount of upfront cash to cover tuition and cost of living, and then choose a school to attend. Underwriting was based on the future income potential of the student.

Blair’s technology platform allowed it to service ISAs for students, such as collecting their payments, tracking their requirements, and giving them updates on their remaining terms. But to really scale up the platform, Blair needed capital to actually underwrite ISAs and increase loan volumes on its platform.

So it looked to raise a debt facility — and then COVID-19 hit. “It was very, very, difficult to raise any kind of debt capital for direct-to-consumer ISAs,” Mahlkow explained in the milieu of a pandemic. But, “we got a lot of inbound demand from education institutions,” and particularly from alternative schools like coding boot camps.

Blair’s team. Photo via Blair.

So Blair rejiggered its platform (now dubbed Blair Servicing) away from D2C lending to being a technology servicing layer for schools offering ISAs as part of their programs. From there, it constructed Blair Capital, this new $100 million facility which can be used by its partner schools to fund their own ISA programs. That means these schools won’t have to raise their own debt capital for their ISAs if they don’t want to.

Unlike Blair’s original approach focused on consumers, underwriting for ISAs is now based on the quality of an individual school, and even more specifically an individual program. So rather than underwriting a person, Blair knows that certain programs have a given return profiles and can underwrite terms of the ISA to fit that risk.

Terms can vary widely between programs. Mahlkow explained that the company more or less has merely floors and ceilings on terms but otherwise is flexible. For instance, the company won’t do income shares above 20% (and often gets queasy even going near that number), and there are repayment caps and limits on repayment time periods as well, with most ISAs it offers being between 1-2 years or a maximum of three years.

Alternative schools with track records of student achievement can use Blair Capital right away. For newer schools without the same operating history, Blair will help guide those schools to build the early track record they need so that the company can underwrite their ISAs in the future. Either way, all schools can use Blair Servicing to handle their loans.

The school dashboard within Blair Servicing. Photo via Blair.

Blair Servicing takes a percentage fee of the money that flows back from an ISA after graduation, while Blair Capital takes an origination fee plus joins in the upside of the ISA itself. The goal is to incentive-align the loans for all parties involved.

The company, which is based in SF, remains lean at six employees. With $100 million capital to fund ISAs though, it hopes to have an outsized impact on this burgeoning industry.

News: Micro-mobility startup Helbiz to go public via a SPAC, and will expand into ghost kitchens

• February 8, 2021
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Micro-mobility startup Helbiz, which now operates across Europe and the USA, is merging with a special purpose acquisition company (“SPAC”) to become a publicly listed company, giving it a war-chest to potentially roll-up smaller competitors in the space, as well as the resources to expand into ‘cloud’ or ‘ghost’ kitchens as part of a move

Micro-mobility startup Helbiz, which now operates across Europe and the USA, is merging with a special purpose acquisition company (“SPAC”) to become a publicly listed company, giving it a war-chest to potentially roll-up smaller competitors in the space, as well as the resources to expand into ‘cloud’ or ‘ghost’ kitchens as part of a move into food delivery.

Helbiz intends to merge with GreenVision Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: GRNV), in the second quarter of 2021. The combined entity will be named Helbiz Inc. and will be listed on the Nasdaq Capital Market under the new ticker symbol, “HLBZ.”

The transaction includes $30 million PIPE anchored by institutional investors and approximately $80 million in net proceeds will be fed into Helbiz’s micro-mobility and advertising businesses, which have 2.7 million users.

Helbiz says the merged entity will have a valuation of $408 million, and by run Helbiz’s existing management under CEO Salvatore Palella.

Palella said: “Through this transaction, we’re committed to fulfilling our vision in revolutionizing transport by using micro-mobility to become a seamless last-mile solution.”

He further revealed to me that the company plans to establish ‘ghost Kitchens’ in Milan and Washington DC later this year, with the aim of introducing a 5 minute delivery time.

Helbiz has tried to differentiate itself from other players like Lime and Bird by offering e-scooters, e-bicycles, and e-mopeds all on one platform.

Key to Helbiz’s offering is an integrated geofencing platform that tends to appeal to city authorities who don’t want scooters left in random places, as well as a swappable battery that enables easier charging of the devices. Its subscription service allows users to take unlimited 30-minute trips on its e-bikes and e-scooters every month.

In Italy, the company currently operates a fleet of e-scooters and e-bicycles in Milan, Turin, Verona, Rome, Madrid, Belgrade, and in the US it operates in in Washington, DC, Alexandria, Arlington and Miami.

David Fu, Chairman, and CEO of GreenVision, commented: “Helbiz has distinguished itself as the only company to offer e-scooters, e-bicycles, and e-mopeds all on one user-friendly platform… Helbiz has a proven and capital-light business model that combines hardware, software, and services with extensive customer relationships.”

News: Goody raises $4 million for its mobile app that lets you send gifts via text

• February 8, 2021
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Unless you’ve got someone’s Amazon Wish List, gift giving today can still be fairly difficult. You don’t necessarily know a friend or family member’s shipping address, their sizes or their particular tastes, at times. A new startup called Goody, backed by a recent $4 million fundraise, wants to help. Through its newly launched mobile gifting

Unless you’ve got someone’s Amazon Wish List, gift giving today can still be fairly difficult. You don’t necessarily know a friend or family member’s shipping address, their sizes or their particular tastes, at times. A new startup called Goody, backed by a recent $4 million fundraise, wants to help. Through its newly launched mobile gifting app, Goody lets you celebrate your friends, family and other loved ones with a gift or, soon, even just an “IOU” that lets them know you’re thinking of them.

To do so, you first download the Goody mobile app for iOS or Android, then browse across the hundreds of brands and products it offers. You also can filter these by occasion, like birthdays or holidays, or by a specific need, such as gifts to say congratulations or get well.

Image Credits: Goody

When you find a gift you like, you just enter the recipient’s phone number. Goody then sends a text that lets the recipient know that you’ve sent them something. The recipient clicks the link to accept the gift, which opens a website where they can see what you’ve selected, while also customizing any specific options — like their clothing size, color preferences or what flavor of cupcakes they’d like, for example.

Here, they also provide their shipping address, and the gift is sent. Afterwards, they can choose to send a thank you note, as well.

What makes this experience work is that — unlike some gifting startups in the past — Goody doesn’t require the recipient to download an app, nor do you need to know anything other than a phone number of the person you want to send a gift to.

Image Credits: Goody

The idea for Goody comes from co-founder and serial entrepreneur and startup investor Edward Lando, whose prior company, YC-backed GovPredict, was recently acquired. He was also the first investor in Misfits Market, serves on the board at Atom Finance and is a managing partner at Pareto Holdings, based in Miami, where Lando now lives.

Joining him on Goody are Even.com tech lead Mark Bao and Lee Linden, who notably sold his prior gifting startup Karma Gifts to Facebook back in 2012.

Lando says he was interested in working on the idea because he loves to send gifts, but thinks there’s a lot of friction involved with the process as it stands today. Meanwhile, gifts that are easier to send, like gift cards, can lack a personal touch.

“The most important thing for us is for Goody to feel highly personal,” Lando explains. “If someone sends you something through Goody [it should feel like], wow, they really thought about me — they picked out something for me. We don’t want it to feel like someone is just sending you a dollar value,” he says.

The mobile app launched in mid-December and now works with a couple dozen brand partners. Many of these are in the direct-to-consumer space or are otherwise emerging companies, like non-alcoholic aperitif Ghia, workout experience The Class, pet company Fable, wellness company Moon Juice, Raaka Chocolate and others.

Image Credits: Goody

Goody’s model involves a revenue share with its partners, where its cut increases the more sales its makes on the partner’s behalf.

Brands are interested in working with Goody, Lando explains, because it can help them acquire new customers with little effort on their part.

“There’s so many direct-to-consumer brands these days — thousands of them — selling online — coffee, chocolate, all these cool things,” Lando says. “And for now, their only way of getting discovered is buying ads on Facebook. We’re another way for people to discover them. We’re like a giant shopping mall for people to discover these things,” he adds.

The app, however, wants to be useful to those who also just want to stay in touch with friends and family. On this front, it’s rolling out free gifts this week called “IOUs,” for telling someone you’re thinking of them — for example, by saying something like “I owe you dinner next time I’m in town” or sharing some other more symbolic gift.

The app will also later integrate a calendar that will help you track important occasions, like birthdays and other major life events.

Goody was founded in March 2020 and the app launched in mid-December of the same year. So far, around 10,000 gifts have been sent using its service, Lando says.

In addition to the holiday season, of course, the pandemic may have played a role in Goody’s early traction.

“I think the pandemic has been a big problem for everyone. And one of the things that people frankly don’t talk about enough, in my opinion, is the psychological toll the pandemic is taking on everyone…we are all creatures that enjoy social interaction. It feels good to see other people — especially the people you care about. And when you don’t, it really drains you of energy,” Lando says.

“This is obviously not the same as seeing people in person, but I do think that Goody is a nice injection of warmth and positivity…Everyone who uses it says they feel good after using it, which I think is rare,” Lando notes.

Image Credits: Goody ad in NYC

The startup, meanwhile, has raised a little more than $4 million in early funding from investors including Quiet Capital, Index Ventures, Pareto Holdings, Third Kind Venture Capital, Craft Ventures and the founders of Coinbase (Fred Ehrsam) and Quora (Charlie Cheever), among others.

Goody is a team of nine full-time employees, based in Miami and elsewhere, working remotely. Ahead of Valentine’s Day, the company snagged a spot on a Times Square billboard to advertise its app, in the hopes of gaining new users during one of the bigger gifting holidays of the year.

The app is available as a free download on the App Store and Google Play.

News: Oscar Health’s IPO filing will test the venture-backed insurance model

• February 8, 2021
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Late Friday, Oscar Health filed to go public, adding another company to today’s burgeoning IPO market. The New York-based health insurance unicorn has raised well north of $1 billion during its life, making its public debut a critical event for a host of investors. Oscar Health lists a placeholder raise value of $100 million in

Late Friday, Oscar Health filed to go public, adding another company to today’s burgeoning IPO market. The New York-based health insurance unicorn has raised well north of $1 billion during its life, making its public debut a critical event for a host of investors.

Oscar Health lists a placeholder raise value of $100 million in its IPO filing, providing only directional guidance that its public offering will raise nine figures of capital.

The eight-year-old company, launched to capitalize on the sweeping health insurance reforms passed under the administration of President Barack Obama offers insurance products to individuals, families and small businesses. The company claimed 529,000 “members” as of January 31, 2021. Oscar Health touts that number as indicative of its success, with its growth since January 31 2017 “representing a compound annual growth rate, or CAGR, of 59%.”

However, while Oscar has shown a strong ability to raise private funds and scale the revenues of its neoinsurance business, like many insurance-focused startups that TechCrunch has covered in recent years, it’s a deeply unprofitable enterprise.

Inside Oscar Health

To understand Oscar Health we have to dig a bit into insurance terminology, but it’ll be as painless as we can manage. So, how did the company perform in 2020? Here are its 2020 metrics, and their 2019 comps:

• Total premiums earned: $1.67 billion (+61% from $1.04 billion).
• Premiums ceded to reinsurers: $1.22 billion (+113%, from $572.3 million).
• Net premium earned: $455 million (-3% from $468.9 million).
• Total revenue: $462.8 million (-5% from $488.2 million).
• Total insurance costs: $525.9 million (-8.7% from $576.1 million).
• Total operating expenses: $865.1 million (+16% from $747.6 million).
• Operating loss: $402.3 million (+56% from $259.4 million).

Let’s walk through the numbers together. Oscar Health did a great job raising its total premium volume in 2020, or, in simpler terms, it sold way more insurance last year than it did in 2019. But it also ceded a lot more premium to reinsurance companies in 2020 than it did in 2019. So what? Ceding premiums is contra-revenue, but can serve to boost overall insurance margins.

As we can see in the net premium earned line, Oscar’s totals fell in 2020 compared to 2019 thanks to greatly expanded premium ceding. Indeed, its total revenue fell in 2020 compared to 2019 thanks to that effort. But the premium ceding seems to be working for the company, as its total insurance costs (our addition of its claims line item and “other insurance costs” category) fell from 2020 to 2019, despite selling far more insurance last year.

Sadly, all that work did not mean that the company’s total operating expenses fell. They did not, rising 16% or so in 2020 compared to 2019. And as we all know, more operating costs and fewer revenues mean that operating losses rose, and they did.

Oscar Health’s net losses track closely to its operating losses, so we spared you more data. Now to better understand the basic economics of Oscar Health’s insurance business, let’s get our hands dirty.

News: Silenced No More Act seeks to ban use of NDAs in situations involving harassment or discrimination

• February 8, 2021
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Ifeoma Ozoma, a former Pinterest employee who alleged racial and gender discrimination at the company, is co-leading new legislation with California State Senator Connie Levya and others to empower those who experience workplace discrimination and/or harassment. Introduced today, the Silenced No More Act (SB 331) would prevent the use of non-disclosure agreements in workplace situations

Ifeoma Ozoma, a former Pinterest employee who alleged racial and gender discrimination at the company, is co-leading new legislation with California State Senator Connie Levya and others to empower those who experience workplace discrimination and/or harassment. Introduced today, the Silenced No More Act (SB 331) would prevent the use of non-disclosure agreements in workplace situations involving all forms of discrimination and harassment.

“It is unacceptable for any employer to try to silence a worker because he or she was a victim of any type of harassment or discrimination—whether due to race, sexual orientation, religion, age or any other characteristic,” Levya said in a statement. “SB 331 will empower survivors to speak out—if they so wish—so they can hold perpetrators accountable and hopefully prevent abusers from continuing to torment and abuse other workers.”

This proposed bill would expand the current protections workers have through the Stand Together Against Non-Disclosures Act, also authored by Levya, that went into effect 2019. Ozoma, along with former coworker Aerica Shimizu Banks, came forward with claims of both racial and gender discrimination last year. They eventually settled with Pinterest, but the STAND Act technically only protected them for speaking out about gender discrimination. This new bill would ensure workers are also protected when speaking out about racial discrimination.

“It was a legal gamble,” Ozoma told TechCrunch about coming forward with claims of both racial and gender discrimination, despite having signed an NDA. Pinterest could’ve decided to sue both Ozoma and Banks, Ozoma said, but that would’ve required the company to admit wrongdoing.

“Technically, we weren’t [supposed to talk about racial discrimination] and that’s what most companies bank on,” she said.

It’s a long road ahead for the bill, which needs to be passed by the legislature and ultimately signed into law by CA Governor Gavin Newsom, but it would represent a monumental shift in the tech industry, if passed.

“It would be huge and not just for tech, but for your industry as well,” she told me. “I believe that we don’t have real progress unless we approach things intersectionally and that’s the lesson from all of us.”

News: Two $50M-ish ARR companies talk growth and plans for the coming quarters

• February 8, 2021
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This group of companies are what we’re calling our $50 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) group, though we’re not too strict on that revenue figure.

Lost amongst all the IPO chatter of the mega-unicorns are a crop of companies reaching their stride, often flush with capital, ready with big plans, and still with some time before they go public. This group of companies are what we’re calling our $50 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) group, though we’re not too strict on that revenue figure.

Close enough will do.

A little bit ago we kicked off the series by looking at  OwnBackup and Assembly. Today we’re continuing the series, digging into SimpleNexus and PicsArt. Next up is and Synack, and we have an interview with Kaseya on deck. The latter company is a bit oversized for our cohort, but we’ll figure out what to do with our notes from that chat in due time.

As a reminder, we’re looking at startups that are around the $50 million ARR mark because our 2020 exploration of $100 million ARR companies wound up merely taking looks at companies, like Lemonade, that were going public in short order. We’ll still do the occasional piece on the group, but we’re focusing on smaller firms this year.

So, into the breach with notes on SimpleNexus and PicsArt, drawing on public information concerning their fundraising history and product, and interviews with both companies. Let’s see what we can learn from their growth!

SimpleNexus

SimpleNexus is a Utah-based technology company that provides digital mortgage software. The company most recently raised $108 million in January of this year, a Series B that we sadly lack a valuation for.

The company is growing quickly, with founders Matt Hansen and Ben Miller telling TechCrunch that they expect to scale from $30 million to $58 million in the next 12 months. That puts the the company comfortably into our new group.

SimpleNexus’s product is sold to banks and other financial institutions, helping provide a hub — a simple nexus, if you will — providing consumers a single login to manage their home-buying process from search to purchase. The software itself is sold on a SaaS basis, often white-labeled to banks.

But while SimpleNexus has seen success with its current model, claiming to touch around one in every eight mortgages, its founders told TechCrunch in a video call that they have bigger aspirations. Hansen, who is also the company’s CEO, said that in the future its service could stick with customers after they buy a home, perhaps helping them connect utilities, find appraisers, and manage their home.

TechCrunch was curious about the company’s recent capital raise, and how it may impact SimpleNexus’s ramp to nearly $60 million in revenue by January 2021. Per the company, it wasn’t looking for capital, but after receiving some inbound offers to sell its entire business, which weren’t what its founders wanted, it decided to raise more external capital instead. Insight, which led the round, was excited about their company, the founders said, thanks to its customer growth and revenue expansion.

News: The Rust programming language finds a new home in a non-profit foundation

• February 8, 2021
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Rust, the programming language — not the survival game, now has a new home: the Rust Foundation. AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla banded together to launch this new foundation today and put a two-year commitment to a million-dollar budget behind it. This budget will allow the project to “develop services, programs, and events that

Rust, the programming language — not the survival game, now has a new home: the Rust Foundation. AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla banded together to launch this new foundation today and put a two-year commitment to a million-dollar budget behind it. This budget will allow the project to “develop services, programs, and events that will support the Rust project maintainers in building the best possible Rust.”

Rust started out as a side project inside of Mozilla to develop an alternative to C/C++ . Designed by Mozilla Research’s Graydon Hore, with contributions from the likes of JavaScript creator Brendan Eich, Rust became the core language for some of the fundamental features of the Firefox browser and its Gecko engine, as well as Mozilla’s Servo engine. Today, Rust is the most-loved language among developers. But with Mozilla’s layoffs in recent months, a lot of the Rust team lost its job and the future of the language became unclear without a main sponsor, though the project itself has thousands of contributors and a lot of corporate users, so the language itself wasn’t going anywhere.

A large open-source project oftens needs some kind of guidance and the new foundation will provide this — and it takes a legal entity to manage various aspects of the community, including the trademark, for example. The new Rust board will feature 5 board directors from the 5 founding members, as well as 5 directors from project leadership.

“Mozilla incubated Rust to build a better Firefox and contribute to a better Internet,” writes Bobby Holley, Mozilla and Rust Foundation Board member, in a statement. “In its new home with the Rust Foundation, Rust will have the room to grow into its own success, while continuing to amplify some of the core values that Mozilla shares with the Rust community.”

All of the corporate sponsors have a vested interest in Rust and are using it to build (and re-build) core aspects of some of their stacks. Google recently said that it will fund a Rust-based project that aims to make the Apache webserver safer, for example, while Microsoft recently formed a Rust team, too, and is using the language to rewrite some core Windows APIs. AWS recently launched Bottlerocket, a new Linux distribution for containers that, for example, features a build system that was largely written in Rust.

News: WeWork is apparently doing better, not that SoftBank wants you to talk about that

• February 8, 2021
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SoftBank’s earnings always leads to a bonanza of news. One storyline that has dominated the company’s earnings over the past few years that has all but disappeared though is WeWork. The co-working company, which saw its scorching-hot flame dim a few years ago and which has been parlayed into such books as Billion Dollar Loser,

SoftBank’s earnings always leads to a bonanza of news. One storyline that has dominated the company’s earnings over the past few years that has all but disappeared though is WeWork.

The co-working company, which saw its scorching-hot flame dim a few years ago and which has been parlayed into such books as Billion Dollar Loser, is all but invisible in SoftBank’s presentations these days. The company, despite being one of the largest investments in the company’s $98.6 billion Vision Fund, is not mentioned in the firm’s quarterly update, and the company’s investor presentation also has no mention of the company. (Its logo does appear on the portfolio page, although it is buried with all the other logos).

Yet, for all the doom that has been emanating from WeWork, from its financial shenanigans to dealing with the workplace in a post-COVID-19 world, results apparently are better than what might be expected.

Buried in the footnotes of SoftBank’s earnings report today is some good news related to WeWork. The Japanese telco conglomerate recognized improvements of $1.36 billion in various credit facilities for WeWork compared to its figures in the first three months of 2020.

Given WeWork’s instability, SoftBank had set aside large sums of capital to cover the rent and mandatory loan payments of WeWork in order to shore up the company’s financial picture. However, “mainly due to the improvement in the credit risk of WeWork” according to SoftBank, the risk profile of those loans has improved quite a bit, and the company no longer feels the need to offer as much of a financial buffer as it did nine months previous.

Now, that could just be some innovative accounting engineering, but that improvement in WeWork’s performance mirrors rumors heard in recent weeks that the company is expected to once again attempt to head to the public markets.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that WeWork was looking to go public via SPAC for a rumored price of $10 billion. No deal has yet been announced, and while SoftBank is in the process of raising two more SPACs for a grand total of three, it is unlikely to merge WeWork through its own vehicles.

While that $10 billion market cap is far below some of the most bullish prices that WeWork was pumping investors on back during its roadshow in September 2019, it nonetheless shows that the company may not be the financial albatross it was two years ago.

News: DoorDash acquires salad-making robotics startup, Chowbotics

• February 8, 2021
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DoorDash is expanding its robotic footprint into the kitchen. The delivery service is set to acquire Chowbotics, a Bay Area-based robotics best known for its salad-making robot, Sally. TechCrunch has confirmed the acquisition, which was first noted by The Wall Street Journal. “We have long admired the work that Chowbotics has done to increase access

DoorDash is expanding its robotic footprint into the kitchen. The delivery service is set to acquire Chowbotics, a Bay Area-based robotics best known for its salad-making robot, Sally. TechCrunch has confirmed the acquisition, which was first noted by The Wall Street Journal.

“We have long admired the work that Chowbotics has done to increase access to fresh meals, with its groundbreaking robotics product and vision,” DoorDash co-founder Stanley Tang said in a comment offered to TechCrunch. “At DoorDash, we are always working to innovate and continue improving how we support our merchant partners and their success — and are excited to leverage this technology to do so in new ways. With the Chowbotics team on board, we can explore new use cases and customers, providing another service to help our merchants grow.”

Founded in 2014, Chowbotics has raised around $21 million to date, including an $11 million round back in 2018. The company’s vending machine-style salad bar robot was already well-positioned for the pandemic, removing a human element from the food preparation process — not to mention the fact that salad bars and buffets tend to be open air affairs. In October, the startup added a contactless feature to the robot, letting users order ahead of time, via app.

“Joining the DoorDash team unlocks new possibilities for Chowbotics and the technology that this team has built over the past seven years,” CEO Rick Wilmer said in a statement. “As the leader in food delivery and on-demand logistics, DoorDash has the unparalleled reach and expertise to help us grow and deploy our technology more broadly, so together, we can make fresh, nutritious food easy for more people.”

It’s not entirely clear how the company’s technology will fit into the delivery service’s current offering, though DoorDash notes it will “improve consumer access to fresh and safe meals, and enhance our robust merchant offerings and logistics platform.” It also remains to be seen whether Chowbotics will continue to operate as its own entity within the broader DoorDash. We’ve reached out for more insight.

“At DoorDash, we strive to become a merchant’s first call when they want to grow their business,” Tang said. “What excites us most about Chowbotics is that the team has developed a remarkable tool for helping merchants grow. Bringing Chowbotics’ technology into the DoorDash platform gives us a new opportunity to help merchants expand their current menu offerings and reach new customers in new markets — which is a fundamental part of our merchant-first approach to empowering local economies.”

DoorDash has been working with robotics companies for a number of years now. Perhaps the most prominent example is a partnership with Starship Technologies to explore food delivery robots. Though that technology has seen a fair number of roadblocks among local officials not eager to turn their sidewalks over to robots. The delivery company likens Chowbotics’ kiosk-style technology to its work with ghost kitchens, effectively serving as a conduit to help expand food options at local merchants – be it in store or through delivery. The former will likely be of more interest once the current pandemic is in the rear view.

Details of the acquisition have not been disclosed.