Monthly Archives: April 2021

News: Facebook ‘looking into’ hiding of posts calling for PM Modi’s resignation in India

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Updated at 1.17am IST, Thursday: Facebook comms Andy Stone said the company has restored the posts and is “looking into what happened.” Original story follows. Facebook has temporarily hidden all posts with hashtag “ResignModi” in India, days after the U.S. social juggernaut — along with Twitter — complied with an order from New Delhi to

Updated at 1.17am IST, Thursday: Facebook comms Andy Stone said the company has restored the posts and is “looking into what happened.”

Original story follows.

Facebook has temporarily hidden all posts with hashtag “ResignModi” in India, days after the U.S. social juggernaut — along with Twitter — complied with an order from New Delhi to censor some posts critical of Indian government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

On its website, Facebook said it had hidden posts with “ResignModi” hashtag because some of those violated its community standards. (A search for “ResignModi” is currently returning some results for users in the U.S.) It’s unclear at this time if Facebook was ordered to take this call or if it did so at its own will.

Tweets with “#ResignModi”, at the time of publication, were visible in India. With over 450 million WhatsApp users and nearly 400 million Facebook users, India is the largest market for the social company by the size of userbase.

Covid cases have surged in the South Asian nation in recent days, prompting many citizens to air their frustrations at the government on social channels as they struggle to find empty beds, oxygen supplies and medicines in hospitals.

Image Credits: Screengrab by TechCrunch

Facebook, which didn’t respond to a request for comment over censorship of posts in India over the weekend, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

News: Lobus raises $6 million for an art management platform on the blockchain

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Reshaping ownership proofs in the fine art markets has been one of the blockchain’s clearest real-world use cases. But in recent months as top auction houses have embraced NFTs and popular artists experiment with the crypto medium, that future has seemed more tangible than ever before. The ex-Christie’s and Sotheby’s team at Lobus is aiming

Reshaping ownership proofs in the fine art markets has been one of the blockchain’s clearest real-world use cases. But in recent months as top auction houses have embraced NFTs and popular artists experiment with the crypto medium, that future has seemed more tangible than ever before.

The ex-Christie’s and Sotheby’s team at Lobus is aiming to commoditize blockchain tech with an asset management platform that they hope can bring creator-friendly mechanisms from NFT marketplaces like SuperRare to the physical art world as well, allowing art owners to maintain partial ownership of the works they sell so that they can benefit from secondary transactions down the line. While physical art sellers have grown accustomed to selling 100% of their work while seeing that value accrue over time as it trades hands, Lobus’s goal is for artist’s to maintain fractional ownership throughout those sales, ensuring that they earn a commission on sales down the road. It’s a radical idea and a logistical nightmare made feasible by the blockchain’s approach to ownership.

“We’re really on a mission of making artists into owners,” Lobus co-CEO Sarah Wendell Sherrill tells TechCrunch. “We are really leveraging the best of what NFTs are putting out there about ownership and asking the questions of how to help create different ownership structures and interrupt this asset class.”

The startup is encapsulating these new mechanics in a wide-reaching art asset management platform that they hope can entice users of the aging legacy software suites being used today. Teaming robust ownership proofs with a CRM, analytics platform and tools like dynamic pricing, Lobus wants to give the art market its own Carta-like software platform that is approachable to the wider market.

Lobus tells TechCrunch they have raised $6 million from Upside Capital, 8VC, Franklin Templeton, Dream Machine, Weekend Fund and BoostVC, among others. Angels participating in the round include Rob Hayes, Troy Carter, Suzy Ryoo, Rebecca and Cal Henderson, Henry Ward and Lex Sokolin.

A big goal for the team has been removing the complexities of understanding what the blockchain is and instead focus on what their tech can deliver to their network of art owners. While the NFT boom of the past few months has already produced billions in sales, efforts like Lobus are attempting to cross-pollinate the mechanics of crypto art with the global art market in an effort to put stakeholders across the board on the same footing. In addition to having partnerships with around 300 active artists, Lobus has also sold their platform to collectors, artist estates and asset managers.

At the moment, Lobus has around 45,000 art objects in its database, encompassing about $5.4 billion in asset value across physical and digital objects.

News: DigitalOcean says customer billing data accessed in data breach

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

DigitalOcean has emailed customers warning of a data breach involving customers’ billing data, TechCrunch has learned. The cloud infrastructure giant told customers in an email on Wednesday, obtained by TechCrunch, that it has “confirmed an unauthorized exposure of details associated with the billing profile on your DigitalOcean account.” The company said the person “gained access

DigitalOcean has emailed customers warning of a data breach involving customers’ billing data, TechCrunch has learned.

The cloud infrastructure giant told customers in an email on Wednesday, obtained by TechCrunch, that it has “confirmed an unauthorized exposure of details associated with the billing profile on your DigitalOcean account.” The company said the person “gained access to some of your billing account details through a flaw that has been fixed” over a two-week window between April 9 and April 22.

The email said customer billing names and addresses were accessed, as well as the last four digits of the payment card, its expiry date and the name of the card-issuing bank. The company said that customers’ DigitalOcean accounts were “not accessed,” and passwords and account tokens were “not involved” in this breach.

“To be extra careful, we have implemented additional security monitoring on your account. We are expanding our security measures to reduce the likelihood of this kind of flaw occuring [sic] in the future,” the email said.

DigitalOcean said it fixed the flaw and notified data protection authorities, but it’s not clear what the apparent flaw was that put customer billing information at risk.

In a statement, DigitalOcean’s security chief Tyler Healy said 1% of billing profiles were affected by the breach, but declined to address our specific questions, including how the vulnerability was discovered and which authorities have been informed.

Companies with customers in Europe are subject to GDPR and can face fines of up to 4% of their global annual revenue.

Last year, the cloud company raised $100 million in new debt, followed by another $50 million round, months after laying off dozens of staff amid concerns about the company’s financial health. In March, the company went public, raising about $775 million in its initial public offering. 

News: India’s entrepreneurs and investors are mobilizing to help the nation fight COVID-19 — and you can too

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

At a time when much of the world has asserted great control over containing the spread of the coronavirus, with countries increasingly vaccinating its citizens, a different story is playing out in India, the world’s second-most populous nation. For a week straight, India has reported more than 300,000 daily new infections, about half of all

At a time when much of the world has asserted great control over containing the spread of the coronavirus, with countries increasingly vaccinating its citizens, a different story is playing out in India, the world’s second-most populous nation.

For a week straight, India has reported more than 300,000 daily new infections, about half of all the cases across the globe, despite cutting down on testing in some states and underreporting deaths.

Hospitals have ran out of beds for new patients, and doctors are consistently pleading on social media, often tagging Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for essential medical supplies such as oxygen.

With several major industries, including film and sports, going about their lives pretending there is no crisis, entrepreneurs and startups have emerged as a rare beam of hope in recent days, springing to action to help the nation navigate its darkest hours.

It’s a refreshing change from last year, when thousands of Indian startups themselves were struggling to survive. And while some startups are still severely disrupted, offering a helping hand to the nation has become the priority for most.

Hundreds of startup entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, if not more, are spending much of their time trying to build software to find ways to make it easier for people to track new updates and make donations to foundations, and are exploring and funding ideas that have the potential to address some of the challenges surrounding the crisis.

Two organizations rising to the occasion include:

ACT Grants, which is run by nearly all active venture funds and PE firms, in addition to dozens of other volunteers. The initiative is the collective group’s continuing effort from last year.

Zomato Feeding India: India’s largest food delivery startup is helping patients and hospitals with oxygen and other crucial supplies.

Additional resources and efforts:

News: Sydney Thomas is coming to judge startups at Disrupt

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Before Precursor Ventures hired Sydney Thomas, the firm was running its operations out of founder Charles Hudson’s inbox, the investor recently recalled. Thomas was hired specifically to do the operational work of bringing a solo GP fund, with less than $5 million in committed capital, to a more organized place — and that’s exactly what

Before Precursor Ventures hired Sydney Thomas, the firm was running its operations out of founder Charles Hudson’s inbox, the investor recently recalled. Thomas was hired specifically to do the operational work of bringing a solo GP fund, with less than $5 million in committed capital, to a more organized place — and that’s exactly what Thomas has done. Which is why we’re honored to have Thomas, a celebrated investor, philanthropist, podcaster and community advocate, attend TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 as a judge for our Startup Battlefield competition.

A graduate of the Haas School of Business at Berkeley in 2016, Thomas is now cutting checks as a principal at Precursor, where she focuses her time on investing and supporting pre-seed companies democratizing access to products and services for what Thomas calls the “mass market economy”. Thomas also founded and hosts the “Be About It” podcast, where she profiles companies that fit the thesis. All of this complements a full extracurricular schedule that includes working on a list of investors committed to backing Black and LatinX founders called “The Interrupters” and serving on the Advisory Board of Invanti — a startup generator in the Midwest. In 2020, she was honored to receive the Champion of Justice Award from Esq. Apprentice, an Oakland-based nonprofit that creates alternative pathways to legal careers.

The Startup Battlefield competition has been the launchpad for hundreds of startups at Disrupt, including Dropbox, Cloudflare, Fitbit and more. If you are interested in throwing in your hat to compete, applications are open now! Thomas joins a number of other seasoned investors as a judge at the show. You should be there as well and can get your ticket to attend for less than $100 for a limited time. Get your pass today!

News: Atlassian’s in-house incubator lets employees put their product ideas to work

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Every company wants to maintain that initial spark it had when it was an early stage startup, but keeping that going as you scale into a public company isn’t always easy. Atlassian is taking a unique approach by opening up product ideas to an internal competition, and actually funding and building the best ones with

Every company wants to maintain that initial spark it had when it was an early stage startup, but keeping that going as you scale into a public company isn’t always easy. Atlassian is taking a unique approach by opening up product ideas to an internal competition, and actually funding and building the best ones with the goal of bringing them to market.

Steve Goldsmith, who is heading up the project for Atlassian says that it’s an in-house startup incubator called Point A. The company wants to encourage employees to be constantly thinking about new ways to improve the products. And every employee is encouraged to participate, not just engineers or product managers, as my might think.

“Point A is our internal framework for turning ideas into products. It’s our way of finding the innovation that’s happening all over the company, and giving a process and framework for those ideas to reach the maturity of actually becoming products that we offer to our customers,” Goldsmith told me.

He says that like many companies they hold internal hackathons and other events where many times employees come up with creative concepts for products, but they tend to get put on a shelf after the event is over and never get looked at again. With Point A, they can actually compete to put their experiments to work and see if they are actually viable.

“So we think of Point A as a way of finding all those different ideas and prototypes and concepts that people have in their brains or on the side of their desk kind of thing, and giving a process and a structure for those ideas to get out the door, and really invest in the ones that have some traction,” Goldsmith said.

He says by providing an official internal process to vet and maybe fund some of them, people inside the organization know that their proposals are being heard and they have a mechanism for submitting them, and the company has a way of seeing them.

The company launched Point A in 2019 looking at 35 possible projects, and testing them as possible products. Last January, they chose 9 that made the final cut and 4 turned into actual products and made it out the door this week including the Jira Work Management tool, which is being released today.

The next program is ready to roll with employees ready to present their ideas in a pitch day competition to get things going. “Our first class is graduating out of this program, and […] we start the process again. We actually just went through our big list of all the ideas to do it a second time, and we are doing a pitch day. It’s going t be a fun Shark Tank, The Voice kind of inspired [competition],” he said.

Company co-founders and co-CEOs Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar both participate in judging the competition, so it has executive buy-in giving more clout to the program and sending a message to employees that their ideas are being taken seriously.

The company provides funding, time away from your regular job, executive coaches and combines that with customer collaboration and early founder involvement with the goal of finding a scalable, repeatable process with defined phases that helps teams take the most innovative ideas from concept to customer.

Some make it. Some don’t as you might expect, but so far the plan seems to be working and is successfully encouraging innovation from within, something every company should be trying to do.

News: Only 48 hours left to save $100 on TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising, our next mini bootcamp for founders in the early innings of their startup journey, takes place July 8-9. It sure seems a long way off, right? But you have only 48 hours left to save $100 on the price of admission. Invest and save with one decisive action.

TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising, our next mini bootcamp for founders in the early innings of their startup journey, takes place July 8-9. It sure seems a long way off, right? But you have only 48 hours left to save $100 on the price of admission.

Invest and save with one decisive action. Buy your TC Early Stage 2021 pass before April 30, at 11:59 p.m. (PT). You’ll save $100 and be set to learn from successful founders, top investors, marketing mavens and other essential experts that span the startup ecosystem.

Now, we can tell you how much actionable advice you’ll receive from our cohort of incredibly talented startup experts — like Mike Duboe, Sarah Kunst, Rahul Vohra and Lisa Wu. We can describe the wide range of interactive presentations and breakout sessions we’ll have for you. We can point out the advantages of opportunity and community.

We can do all of that until we’re blue in the face. But today, we’re going to let your contemporaries do the talking and share what they took away from their experience at TechCrunch Early Stage 2020.

The TC Early Stage virtual platform lets you network with attendees all over the world, and that was a big benefit. I met other early-stage founders to learn what they’re working on, pool resources and connect for potential future opportunities. — Ashley Barrington, founder, MarketPearl.

I wondered whether Early Stage 2020 was going to be just another virtual online class — long on PowerPoints and short on useful information. But it was engaging and interactive with lots of information I could implement right away. — Chloe Leaaetoa, founder, Socicraft.

I learned a lot from the various presentations. Ann Miura-Ko from Floodgate emphasized that a minimum viable company is more than product and market fit. It’s the business model, too. That third component’s important and something other startup education programs often omit. — Katia Paramonova, founder and CEO of Centrly.

Join your community of early-stage founders determined to build a successful startup on July 8-9 at TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising. And jump on this opportunity to save $100. Buy your pass before the early-bird price disappears in 48 short hours on April 30, at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Early Stage 2021 – Marketing & Fundraising? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

News: Solar roof-tile and energy startup SunRoof closes €4.5M led by Inovo Venture Partners

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

SunRoof is a European startup that has come up with a clever idea. It has its own roof-tile technology which generates solar power. It then links up those houses, creating a sort of virtual power plant, allowing homeowners to sell surplus energy back to the grid. It’s now closed a €4.5 million round (Seed extension)

SunRoof is a European startup that has come up with a clever idea. It has its own roof-tile technology which generates solar power. It then links up those houses, creating a sort of virtual power plant, allowing homeowners to sell surplus energy back to the grid.

It’s now closed a €4.5 million round (Seed extension) led by Inovo Venture Partners, with participation from SMOK Ventures (€2m of which came in the form of convertible notes). Other investors include LT Capital, EIT InnoEnergy, FD Growth Capital and KnowledgeHub. 

Sweden-based SunRoof’s approach is reminiscent of Tesla Energy, with its solar roof tiles, but whereas Tesla runs a closed energy ecosystem, SunRoof plans to work with multiple energy partners.

To achieve this virtual power company, SunRoof CEO and serial entrepreneur Lech Kaniuk (formerly of Delivery Hero, PizzaPortal, and iTaxi), acquired the renewable energy system, Redlogger, in 2020.

SunRoof’s platform consists of 2-in-1 solar roofs and façades that generate electricity without needing traditional photovoltaic modules. Instead, they use monocrystalline solar cells sandwiched between two large sheets of glass which measure 1.7 sq meters. Because the surface area is large and the connections fewer, the roofs are cheaper and faster to build. 

SunRoof give homeowners an energy app to manage the solar, based on Redlogger’s infrastructure

Tesla’s Autobidder is a trading platform that manages the energy from roofs but is a closed ecosystem. SunRoof, by contrast, works with multiple partners.

Kaniuk said: “SunRoof was founded to make the move to renewable energy not only easy, but highly cost-effective without ever having to sacrifice on features or design. We’ve already grown more than 500% year-on-year and will use the latest funding to double down on growth.” 

Michal Rokosz, Partner at Inovo Venture Partners, commented: “The market of solar energy is booming, estimated to reach $334 billion by 2026. Technology of integrated solar roofs is past the inflection point. It is an economical no-brainer for consumers to build new homes using solar solutions. With a more elegant and efficient substitute to a traditional hybrid of rooftops and solar panels, SunRoof clearly stands out and has a chance to be the brand for solar roofs, making clean-tech more appealing to a wider customer-base.”

The team includes co-founder Marek Zmysłowski (ex-(Jumia Travel and HotelOnline.co), former Google executive, Rafal Plutecki, and former Tesla Channel Sales Manager, Robert Bruchner.

There are rollout plans for Sweden, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and the US.

News: Atlassian launches a Jira for every team

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Atlassian today announced a new edition of its Jira project management tool, Jira Work Management. The company has long been on a journey of bringing Jira to teams beyond the software development groups it started out with. With Jira Service Management, it is successfully doing that with IT teams. With Jira Core, it also moved

Atlassian today announced a new edition of its Jira project management tool, Jira Work Management. The company has long been on a journey of bringing Jira to teams beyond the software development groups it started out with. With Jira Service Management, it is successfully doing that with IT teams. With Jira Core, it also moved further in this direction, but Jira Work Management takes this a step further. The idea here is to offer a version of Jira that enables teams across marketing, HR, finance, design and other groups to manage their work and — if needed — connect it to that of a company’s development teams.

“JIRA Software’s this de-facto standard,” Atlassian’s VP of Product Noah Wasmer told me. “We’re making just huge inroads with JIRA Service Management right now, bringing IT teams into that loop. We have over 100,000 customers now on those two products. So it’s really doing incredibly well. But one of the things that CIOs say is that it’s really tough to put JIRA Software in front of an HR team and the legal team. They often ask, what is code? What is a pull request?”

Image Credits: Atlassian

Wasmer also noted that even though Jira Software is specifically meant for developers, about half of its users are already in other teams that work with these development teams. “We think that [Jira Work Management] gives them the more contextually relevant tool — a tool that actually helps them accelerate and move faster,” Wasmer said.

With Jira Work Management, the company is looking at making it easier for any team to track and manage their work in what Wasmer described as a “universal system and family of product.” As company’s look at how to do remote and hybrid work, Atlassian believes that they’ll need this kind of core product to keep track of the work that is being done. But it’s also about the simple fact that every business is now a software business and while every team’s work touches upon this, marketing and design teams often still work in their own silos.

Image Credits: Atlassian

These different teams, though, also have quite different expectations of the user interface they need to manage their work most effectively. So while Jira Work Management features all of the automation features and privacy controls of its brethren, it is based around a slightly different and simplified user interface than Jira Software, for example.

What’s even more important, though, is that Jira Work Management offers a variety of views for teams to enter and manipulate their data. To get new users onboarded quickly, Atlassian built a set of templates for some of the most common use cases it expects, though users are obviously free to customize all these different views to their hearts’ — and business needs’ — content.

Atlassian also changed some of the language around Jira tickets. There are no ‘stories’ and ‘bugs’ in Jira Work Management (unless you add them yourself) and instead, these templates use words like ‘tasks,’ ‘assets’ (for design use cases) or ‘candidates’ (for HR).

Image Credits: Atlassian

Given the fact that spreadsheets are the universal language of business, it’s maybe no surprise that the List view is core here, with an Excel/Airtable-like experience that should immediately feel familiar to any business user. It’s in-line editable and completely abstracts away the usual Jira ticket, even though underneath, it’s the same taxonomy and infrastructure.

“We really wanted people to walk into this product and just understand that there is work that needs to be done,” Chase Wilson, the head of product marketing for Jira Work Management, said. He noted that the team worked on making the experience feel snappy.

Image Credits: Atlassian

The other view available are pretty straightforward a calendar and Gantt chart-like timeline view, as well as the traditional Kanban board that has long been at the core of Jira (and Agile in general).

Jira Work Management also lets users build forms, using a drag and drop editor that makes it easy for anybody inside an organization to build forms and collect requests that way. Only a few weeks ago, Atlassian announced the acquisition of ThinkTilt, the company behind the popular no-code from builder ProForma and it looks like it is already putting this acquisition to work here.

As Wasmer stressed, Jira Work Management is meant to help different teams get work done in a way that works best for them. But because Jira is now a family of products, it also enables a lot more cross-team collaboration. That means a development team that is working on implementing a GDPR requirement can now build a workflow that ties in with the project board for a legal team that then allows legal to hold up a software release until it approves this new feature.

“We hear about this all the time today,” he said. “They just stick the legal team into JIRA Software — and it over-inundates them with information that’s not relevant to what they’re trying to get done. Now we can expose them. And we also then get that legal team, that marketing team, exposed to different templates for different work. What they’re finding is that once they get used to it for that must-do use case, they start saying: Well, hey, why don’t I use this for contract approvals at the end of the quarter?’”

Image Credits: Atlassian

As for pricing, Atlassian follows its same standard template here, offering a free tier for teams with up to 10 users and then the paid tiers start at $5/user/month, with discounts for larger teams.

Looking ahead, Atlassian plans to add more reporting capabilities, native approvals for faster signoffs and more advanced functionality across the new work views.

It’s worth noting that Jira Work Management is the first product to come out of Point A, Atlassian’s new innovation program “dedicated to connecting early adopter customers with product teams to build the next generation of teamwork tools.”

News: Uber adds vaccine booking, car rental delivery in new product push

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Uber is launching more than a half-dozen new features, including one that will let users book vaccine appointments at Walgreens and reserve a ride to get their jab, as the company homes in on a business model that will finally deliver profitability. The features, announced Wednesday, fall under what Uber is describing as its “go

Uber is launching more than a half-dozen new features, including one that will let users book vaccine appointments at Walgreens and reserve a ride to get their jab, as the company homes in on a business model that will finally deliver profitability.

The features, announced Wednesday, fall under what Uber is describing as its “go get” strategy. It’s also meant to mark a return to more “normal” business operations following 14 months of shutdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The numerous features that include vaccine booking, a valet service that will drop off a rental car, reserved rides at airports that off up a an hour of wait time and options to pick up food during a rideshare route are all centered around Uber’s core services of delivery and ride-hailing.

In early 2020, Uber looked like a different business with a web of pursuits that covered air taxis and self-driving cars, delivery, ridesharing, a freight booking platform and shared ebike and scooter rentals. In the past year, Uber has dumped shared micromobility unit Jump, offloaded its autonomous air taxi business Uber Elevate, sold off its Uber ATG self-driving unit and sold a stake in its growing but still unprofitable logistics arm, Uber Freight. (Uber has maintained equity in all of these businesses).

This wasn’t just about riding itself of businesses. During this same period, Uber also doubled down on rideshare and delivery — acquiring Postmates and Drizly in the process — in a bet that these two areas would be the best path to profitability. Uner’s Go Get initiative is a continuation of that strategy. Meanwhile, COVID-19 decimated its rideshare — along with competitors — business as delivery exploded.

Image Credits: Uber

“Over the last year, the company has evolved into a platform where we’re doing two things with incredible focus and incredible intensity,” Uber CPO Sundeep Jain said in a recent interview. “And those are helping users ‘go’ and helping users ‘get.’ We really have evolved this platform where you can go anywhere, get anything.”

For Uber, this means building products that let people “go” somewhere using a variety of different modes from cars and scooters to buses and other forms of public transit or “get” anything such as prepared food from restaurants and more recently expanding into groceries, prescriptions and alcohol. This “go” and “get” directive is influencing the company’s product development and even acquisition strategy. With Uber’s acquisition of Postmates, the company even deliver iPhones, Jain noted as one example.

Among the new features is Uber Rent with Valet, which lets users in the U.S. rent a car directly in the Uber app. The vehicle is then delivered to the user, whether it’s at their home or airport. The company’s Uber Reserve feature is now being rolled out across the U.S. as well, and includes flight tracking, 60 minutes of wait time and curbside pickup.

On the “get” front of this strategy, Uber has launched “Pick Up and Go” which lets a rideshare user place an order for pickup and add a stop to pick up the order while en route to their final destination. Uber also rolled out a new ‘schedule’ button that includes an option to order from merchants, even when they’re closed. There’s also new capability to add on items from a second merchant at check out for no additional delivery fee.

Uber has also added a savings hub that will highlight every eligible offer, deal and discount available to users, a new feature that gives delivery reminders via in-app notifications and an extension of its Eats Pass membership.

All of this, is of course, aimed at the holy “profitability” grail. And it appears to be closer than it was a year ago. Earlier this month, Uber released a SEC filing that maintained it still expects quarterly Adjusted EBITDA profitability in 2021. Uber also reported its gross bookings in March reached the highest monthly level in the company’s nearly 12-year history. The company’s mobility business posted its best month since March 2020, crossing a $30 billion annualized Gross Bookings run-rate, with average daily Gross Bookings up 9% month-over-month. The company’s delivery business set another all-time record, crossing a $52 billion annualized Gross Bookings run-rate in March, growing more than 150% year-over-year, the filing said. 

The upshot: March was Uber’s best in its history in terms of gross sales on its platform. However, as TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm noted recently, while Uber’s delivery business has scaled, it is still less profitable than its main rideshare business. The company has reached a new total platform spend record, but it’s made up of less profitable revenue than before.

This Go Get program appears to be aimed finding new ways to build out its ridehailing business — which in previous quarters generated the superior result, generating positive adjusted EBITDA — while expanding delivery without adding costs.