Monthly Archives: April 2021

News: Cadillac’s all-electric Lyriq flagship to start just below $60,000

• April 21, 2021
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The Cadillac Lyriq, the all-electric crossover and flagship of GM’s luxury brand, will start at a skosh under $60,000 when it comes to the U.S. market in early 2022. The price, which doesn’t include destination charges, is one of the last remaining details to be shared about the production version of the Lyriq. GM first

The Cadillac Lyriq, the all-electric crossover and flagship of GM’s luxury brand, will start at a skosh under $60,000 when it comes to the U.S. market in early 2022.

The price, which doesn’t include destination charges, is one of the last remaining details to be shared about the production version of the Lyriq. GM first revealed a showcar version of the Lyriq back in August. On Wednesday, the automaker announced the pricing along with the final specifications of the production vehicle.

The Lyriq is just one in a roster of 30 electric vehicles that GM plans to bring to market by 2025. It will be a critical one for Cadillac and aims to set the benchmark for the brand that has seen lagging sales. The big message from GM: this car is coming soon, messaging that includes an invitation to customers to place order reservations beginning in September 2021.

The Cadillac Lyriq was supposed to go into production in the U.S. in late 2022, but executives said that virtual development tools and along with the underlying flexible Ultium platform used in the vehicle allowed the brand to speed up development.

The Ultium electric architecture and Ultium batteries will be used in a broad range of products across GM’s Cadillac, Buick, Chevrolet and GMC brands, as well as the Cruise Origin autonomous shuttle. This modular architecture will be capable of 19 different battery and drive unit configurations, 400-volt and 800-volt packs with storage ranging from 50 kWh to 200 kWh, and front, rear and all-wheel drive configurations.

The rear-wheel drive Lyriq will be equipped with a 100 kilowatt-hour battery pack that can travel more than 300 miles based on Cadillac’s internal estimates. The EPA estimates have yet to be shared. The Lyriq will be able to handle fast charging at 190 kW, which translates to an estimated 76 miles of range in about 10 minutes of charging time. For home charging, there’s a 19.2 kW charging module, which can add up to 52 miles of range per hour of charge, the company said.

The vehicle aims to ooze luxury, a look that GM tries to achieve with exterior and interior touches like the “black crystal” grille, 33-inch vertical LED touchscreen display and AKG sound system. The vehicle has fast roofline and wide stance that is meant to give it a modern and even aggressive-looking look. That “black crystal” grille is a dynamic feature with “choreographed” LED lighting that greets the owner as they approach the vehicle. The LED lighting continues in the rear with a split taillamp design.

The vehicle will be offered in two exterior and interior colors. On the outside, the vehicle can come in satin steel metallic or stellar black metallic paint and sky cool gray or noir for the interior. Cadillac adds in laser etched patterns through wood over metal décor to complete the interior look.

The Lyriq will also offer Super Cruise, GM’s hands-free driver assistance system, which combines lidar map data, high-precision GPS, cameras and radar sensors, as well as a driver attention system, which monitors the person behind the wheel to ensure they’re paying attention. Unlike Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance system, users of Super Cruise do not need to have their hands on the wheel. However, their eyes must remain directed straight ahead.

Like the GM’s Chevy Bolt, the Lyriq will offer what it describes as one pedal driving. Electric vehicles typically have a regenerative braking feature. In the Lyriq, drivers are able to control how quickly the vehicle slows down or comes to a complete stop using a pressure-sensitive paddle located on the steering wheel.

The vehicle will be produced at GM’s Spring Hill, Tennessee assembly facility. GM has said it is investing $2 billion into the plant to support electric vehicle production. The automaker and its joint venture partner LG energy Solution also announced in April plans to invest $2.3 billion to build a battery cell manufacturing plant at next to the Spring Hill assembly plant.

News: Europe lays out plan for risk-based AI rules to boost trust and uptake

• April 21, 2021
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European Union lawmakers have presented their risk-based proposal for regulating high risk applications of artificial intelligence within the bloc’s single market. The plan includes prohibitions on a small number of use-cases that are considered too dangerous to people’s safety or EU citizens’ fundamental rights, such as a China-style social credit scoring system or certain types

European Union lawmakers have presented their risk-based proposal for regulating high risk applications of artificial intelligence within the bloc’s single market.

The plan includes prohibitions on a small number of use-cases that are considered too dangerous to people’s safety or EU citizens’ fundamental rights, such as a China-style social credit scoring system or certain types of AI-enabled mass surveillance.

Most uses of AI won’t face any regulation (let alone a ban) under the proposal but a subset of so-called “high risk” uses will be subject to specific regulatory requirements, both ex ante and ex post.

There are also transparency requirements for certain use-cases — such as chatbots and deepfakes — where EU lawmakers believe that potential risk can be mitigated by informing users that they are interacting with something artificial.

The overarching goal for EU lawmakers is to foster public trust in how AI is implemented to help boost uptake of the technology. Senior Commission officials talk about wanting to develop an excellence ecosystem that’s aligned with European values.

“Today, we aim to make Europe world-class in the development of a secure, trustworthy and human-centered Artificial Intelligence, and the use of it,” said Commission EVP, Margrethe Vestager, announcing adoption of the proposal at a press conference.

“On the one hand, our regulation addresses the human and societal risks associated with specific uses of AI. This is to create trust. On the other hand, our coordinated plan outlines the necessary steps that Member States should take to boost investments and innovation. To guarantee excellence. All this, to ensure that we strengthen the uptake of AI across Europe.”

Under the proposal, mandatory requirements are attached to a “high risk” category of applications of AI — meaning those that present a clear safety risk or threaten to impinge on EU fundamental rights (such as the right to non-discrimination).

Examples of high risk AI use-cases that will be subject to the highest level of regulation on use are set out in annex 3 of the regulation — which the Commission said it will have the power to expand by delegate acts, as use-cases of AI continue to develop and risks evolve.

For now cited high risk examples fall into the following categories: Biometric identification and categorisation of natural persons; Management and operation of critical infrastructure; Education and vocational training; Employment, workers management and access to self-employment; Access to and enjoyment of essential private services and public services and benefits; Law enforcement; Migration, asylum and border control management; Administration of justice and democratic processes.

Military uses of AI are specifically excluded from scope as the regulation is focused on the bloc’s internal market.

The makers of high risk applications will have a set of ex ante obligations to comply with before bringing their product to market, including around the quality of the data-sets used to train their AIs and a level of human oversight over not just design but use of the system — as well as ongoing, ex post requirements, in the form of post-market surveillance.

Other requirements include a need to create records of the AI system to enable compliance checks and also to provide relevant information to users. The robustness, accuracy and security of the AI system will also be subject to regulation.

Commission officials suggested the vast majority of applications of AI will fall outside this highly regulated category. Makers of those ‘low risk’ AI systems will merely be encouraged to adopt (non-legally binding) codes of conduct on use.

Penalties for infringing the rules on specific AI use-case bans have been set at up to 6% of global annual turnover or €30M (whichever is greater). While violations of the rules related to high risk applications can scale up to 4% (or €20M).

Enforcement will involve multiple agencies in each EU Member State — with the proposal intending oversight be carried out by existing (relevant) agencies, such as product safety bodies and data protection agencies.

That raises immediate questions over adequate resourcing of national bodies, given the additional work and technical complexity they will face in policing the AI rules; and also how enforcement bottlenecks will be avoided in certain Member States. (Notably, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation is also overseen at the Member State level and has suffered from lack of uniformly vigorous enforcement.)

There will also be an EU-wide database set up to create a register of high risk systems implemented in the bloc (which will be managed by the Commission).

A new body, called the European Artificial Intelligence Board (EAIB), will also be set up to support a consistent application of the regulation — in a mirror to the European Data Protection Board which offers guidance for applying the GDPR.

In step with rules on certain uses of AI, the plan includes measures to co-ordinate EU Member State support for AI development — such as by establishing regulatory sandboxes to help startups and SMEs develop and test AI-fuelled innovations — and via the prospect of targeted EU funding to support AI developers.

Internal market commissioner Thierry Breton said investment is a crucial piece of the plan.

“Under our Digital Europe and Horizon Europe program we are going to free up a billion euros per year. And on top of that we want to generate private investment and a collective EU-wide investment of €20BN per year over the coming decade — the ‘digital decade’ as we have called it,” he said. “We also want to have €140BN which will finance digital investments under Next Generation EU [COVID-19 recovery fund] — and going into AI in part.”

Shaping rules for AI has been a key priority for EU president Ursula von der Leyen who took up her post at the end of 2019. A white paper was published last year, following a 2018 AI for EU strategy — and Vestager said that today’s proposal is the culmination of three years’ work.

Breton added that providing guidance for businesses to apply AI will give them legal certainty and Europe an edge. “Trust… we think is vitally important to allow the development we want of artificial intelligence,” he said. [Applications of AI] need to be trustworthy, safe, non-discriminatory — that is absolutely crucial — but of course we also need to be able to understand how exactly these applications will work.”

“What we need is to have guidance. Especially in a new technology… We are, we will be, the first continent where we will give guidelines — we’ll say ‘hey, this is green, this is dark green, this is maybe a little bit orange and this is forbidden’. So now if you want to use artificial intelligence applications, go to Europe! You will know what to do, you will know how to do it, you will have partners who understand pretty well and, by the way, you will come also in the continent where you will have the largest amount of industrial data created on the planet for the next ten years.

“So come here — because artificial intelligence is about data — we’ll give you the guidelines. We will also have the tools to do it and the infrastructure.”

A version of today’s proposal leaked last week — leading to calls by MEPs to beef up the plan, such as by banning remote biometric surveillance in public places.

In the event the final proposal does treat remote biometric surveillance as a particularly high risk application of AI — and there is a prohibition in principal on the use of the technology in public by law enforcement.

However use is not completely proscribed, with a number of exceptions where law enforcement would still be able to make use of it, subject to a valid legal basis and appropriate oversight.

Today’s proposal kicks off the start of the EU’s co-legislative process, with the European Parliament and Member States via the EU Council set to have their say on the draft — meaning a lot could change ahead of agreement on a final pan-EU regulation.

Commissioners declined to give a timeframe for when legislation might be adopted, saying only that they hoped the other EU institutions would engage immediately and that the process could be done asap. It could, nonetheless, be several years before the AI regulation is ratified and in force.

News: Hive raises $85M for AI-based APIs to help moderate content, identify objects and more

• April 21, 2021
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As content moderation continues to be a critical aspect of how social media platforms work — one that they may be pressured to get right, or at least do better in tackling — a startup that has built a set of data and image models to help with that, along with any other tasks that

As content moderation continues to be a critical aspect of how social media platforms work — one that they may be pressured to get right, or at least do better in tackling — a startup that has built a set of data and image models to help with that, along with any other tasks that require automatically detecting objects or text, is announcing a big round of funding.

Hive, which has built a training data trove based on crowdsourced contributions from some 2 million people globally, which then powers a set of APIs that can be used to identify automatically images of objects, words and phrases — a process used not just in content moderation platforms, but also in building algorithms for autonomous systems, back-office data processing, and more — has raised $85 million in a Series D round of funding that the startup has confirmed values it at $2 billion.

“At the heart of what we’re doing is building AI models that can help automate work that used to be manual,” said Kevin Guo, Hive’s co-founder and CEO. “We’ve heard about RPA and other workflow automation, and that is important too but what that has also established is that there are certain things that humans should not have to do that is very structural, but those systems can’t actually address a lot of other work that is unstructured.” Hive’s models help bring structure to that other work, and Guo claims they provide “near human level accuracy.”

The funding is being led by Glynn Capital, with General Catalyst, Tomales Bay Capital, Jericho Capital, and Bain & Company, and other unnamed investors participating. The company has now raised $121 million, making this latest round a particularly big leap. 

The company has been somewhat under the radar since it was founded in 2017, in what appears to have been a pivot from founder Kevin Guo’s previous startup, a Q&A platform that was called Kiwi, which itself was a product of a project out of his time at Stanford. But since then it has quietly picked up some interesting customers, including Reddit, Yubo, Chatroulette, Omegle, and Tango, along with NBCUniversal, Interpublic Group, Walmart, Visa, Anheuser-Busch InBev, and more. In all it has some 100 customers and has grown more than 300% in the last year.

Hive had its start with image identification, and working with companies building autonomous systems. In fact, if you talk with Guo over Zoom, chances are you’ll get a screenshot of some of that work as a background, with cars darting across Golden Gate Bridge.

These days, however, most of Hive’s activity (pardon the pun) comes around moderation, some of which includes images, but others including text and streamed audio — which is converted into text and then moderated as that would be. (The autonomous car modelling is still used as a backdrop, I believe, because it’s a little less disturbing than a content moderation image, as you can see below.)

In part because it’s a very classic problem that you can imagine will be solved or helped with the use of AI, and in part because it’s such a big issue on the internet today, there are a number of other startups building platforms to help manage online abuse, including harassment, and to help with content moderation.

They include the likes of Sentropy, Block Party, L1ght, and Spectrum Labs, not to mention a lot of tools being built in-house by big technology companies themselves. (Instagram for example launched its latest tools to help users combat abuse in DMs just today: it built the whole thing in-house, the company told me.)

But as Kevin Guo describes it, what has set Hive apart from the crowd has been the crowd, so to speak. Over the last several years, the company has slowly been building up a trove of data by crowdsourcing feedback from some 2 million users, who get paid — either in ‘normal’ money or Bitcoin — to go through various images and items of text in order to identify “abuse” or other things. (Bitcoin started as a fringe offering and now accounts for the majority of how contributors get paid, Guo said.)

That database in turn powers a set of APIs used by Hive’s customers to help them run their own moderation tools, or whatever workflow requires frequent and rapid identification.

Most of the language learning in the system right now is based around English and several other popular global languages such as Spanish and French. Some of the funding will be used to help expand its reach and global coverage, including into a wider set of tongues. This is also leading to a wider set of use cases for the data and technology that Hive has built.

One of these, Guo said, includes a new approach to advertising that is based around serving ads associated with something you may have just read or seen on the screen. Very GDPR friendly because it involves absolutely no involvement of data based you or your online browsing activities (anonymised or not), this is picking up traction with brands who initially may have come to Hive to help protect their IP or reputation management, and are now considering how they can use the tool to spread the word about themselves in more effective ways.

The possibilities for how Hive’s AI can be used in the future, is part of what attracted the investment today. The focus on how it has been built in the cloud underscores that extensibility.

“Cloud computing has seen tremendous adoption in recent years, but only a small fraction of companies currently leverage cloud-based machine learning solutions,” said Charlie Friedland, principal at Glynn Capital, in a statement. “We believe cloud-hosted machine learning models will represent one of the most significant components of cloud growth in the years to come, and Hive is well-positioned as an early leader in the space.”

It’s notable to me that for now at least Hive doesn’t disclose any big technology companies among its customers. That may partly be due to NDAs, but Guo points out that their in-house activities, which include heavy doses of human involvement, have made them somewhat less willing customers up to now. That could be changing however, not just because AI tools are improving, but because of the problems that have arisen from some of the current routes, such as the run of controversial stories about social media content moderators and the traumas that they have faced.

In terms of future deals, those might come by way of some of Hive’s strategic backers and strategic partnerships. The company currently works with companies like Cognizant, Comscore and Bain (which is an investor), who in turn provide consulting and services to larger tech companies that have opted to outsource some of their human moderation work. Whether those human moderators shift up practices or not, chances are that tech will be playing an increasing role in the bigger process of trying to give more structure both to shaping and adhering to abuse policies.

News: Running apps still lag behind on privacy and security

• April 21, 2021
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Some of the most popular running apps are still lagging behind on security and privacy. That’s the verdict from security researchers who examined the leading running apps five years apart and found only a few apps had improved — and not by much. Running apps know and learn a lot about you as you use

Some of the most popular running apps are still lagging behind on security and privacy. That’s the verdict from security researchers who examined the leading running apps five years apart and found only a few apps had improved — and not by much.

Running apps know and learn a lot about you as you use them. Your health data, like your height and weight, are used to calculate how many calories you burn, and your location data can track your workout route from door-to-door.

But in the wrong hands, this data can identify where you live or where you work. In 2018, Strava said it would simplify its privacy features to allow its users greater control over their data, after researchers found Strava app users were inadvertently sharing their workout data and revealing military bases and secret government facilities.

Now, researchers at U.K. cybersecurity firm Pen Test Partners say many of the top apps — Strava, Runkeeper, MapMyRun, Nike Run Club, and Runtastic — still don’t use basic security measures to prevent hackers from breaking in, or health and fitness data spilling out.

Only Runtastic had set a stronger password policy over the past five years, while the other apps still allow some of the most basic passwords like “123456” and “password,” the researchers found in their testing. Malicious hackers often automate their attacks by targeting user accounts with known or easy-to-guess passwords. Worse, none of the apps allow users to set up two-factor authentication, a feature that puts an additional barrier in place to prevent malicious hackers from reusing stolen passwords. Data from Google shows even the simplest form of two-factor authentication can prevent most automated password reuse attacks.

We asked each of the app makers why they had not implemented two-factor authentication. None of the companies commented.

The researchers also found that while Runtastic, Nike Run Club, and MapMyRun had improved their privacy controls, Strava had seen “no significant change.”

From their report: “Strava and Runkeeper are configured to publicly share user data by default. It is possible to change these settings in the application, but it takes some time to find them and set them correctly, which is probably not the first consideration for a regular user.”

“Nike Run Club, Runtastic and MapMyRun [were] found to have better privacy policy settings enabled, which means they do not share users’ data by default, like the other applications do. They only share your training information with friends or followers,” the report said.

News: Expenses startup Pleo preps $100M Series C funding, launches new bill payments service

• April 21, 2021
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Late-stage Fintech startup Pleo, which offers expense management tools and ‘smart’ company Mastercards, says it plans to raise a Series C round of funding this summer. It’s also launching a B2B bill payments service this week. Co-founder and CEO Jeppe Rindom told me via a call: “We have money until 2022, but we’ve seen incredible

Late-stage Fintech startup Pleo, which offers expense management tools and ‘smart’ company Mastercards, says it plans to raise a Series C round of funding this summer. It’s also launching a B2B bill payments service this week.

Co-founder and CEO Jeppe Rindom told me via a call: “We have money until 2022, but we’ve seen incredible momentum in the past couple of quarters, and we are getting a lot of inbound interest so we will be fundraising a Series C round in the Summer and will be raising around $100 million.”

Pleo has raised $78.8 million to date. Its last funding round was $56M in May 2019. Its main investors include Speedinvest, Creandum, Kinnevik, Stripes and Founders.

The startup competes on some levels with Dext, Soldo, Spendesk and Expensify.

Pleo is today launching Bills, a platform to consolidate, track and pay business-to-business bill payments and a supplier’s terms of service. It will offer free-of-charge domestic transfers.

Bills are automatically processed using Pleo’s OCR technology and cross-referenced for duplication and validated for authenticity before being approved for payment

In addition, it will offer approval control for admins and free domestic transfers.

Rindom added: “Since 66% of admins told us that they spent half their time on processing bills as well as authenticating the validity of them, it became our mission to simplify this complicated process and provide an end-to-end overview of it.”

Pleo was founded in Copenhagen in 2015 by Rindom and Niccolo Perra, who were early team members Tradeshift.

News: ActiveCampaign raises $240M at a $3B valuation as marketing and sales automation come into focus for SMBs

• April 21, 2021
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As businesses continue to adopt new digital tools to get their names out into the world, a startup that’s built a sales and marketing platform specifically for small and medium businesses is announcing a big round of funding. ActiveCampaign, which has built what it describes as a “customer experience automation” platform — providing a way

As businesses continue to adopt new digital tools to get their names out into the world, a startup that’s built a sales and marketing platform specifically for small and medium businesses is announcing a big round of funding. ActiveCampaign, which has built what it describes as a “customer experience automation” platform — providing a way not just to run digital campaigns but to follow up aspects of them automatically to make sales and marketing work more efficiently — has closed a $240 million round of funding. The Series C values the Chicago startup at over $3 billion.

The round is being led by a new, big-name investor, Tiger Global, with participation from another new backer Dragoneer, along with Susquehanna Growth Equity and Silversmith Capital Partners, which had both invested previously.

This funding round represents a huge leap for ActiveCampaign. It was only in January 2020 that it raised $100 million, and before that, the company, which was founded in 2003, had only raised $20 million.

But as we have seen in many other ways, the pandemic resulted in a surge of interest among businesses to do more — a lot more — online than ever before, not least because so many people were spending more time at home, carrying out their consumer lives over the internet. That led to ActiveCampaign growing to a customer base of 145,000 customers, up from 90,000 16 months ago.

That points not just to the company already growing at a decent clip before the pandemic, but how it capitalized on that at a time when companies were looking for more tools to run their businesses in the new world.

The growth was not about ActiveCampaign throwing more money into business development, founder and CEO Jason VandeBoom said in an interview. “It was the network effect of people finding success. Even today, organic word of mouth is our primary driver.”

The company’s tools fit into a wider overall trend in the world of business: automation, built on the back of new, cloud-based technology, is being adopted to carry out some of the less interesting and repetitive aspects of running a business.

In the case of sales, an example of what ActiveCampaign might provide is a way for an e-commerce business to identify when a logged-in customer (that is, a user who has an account already and is signed in) might have ‘abandoned’ a visit to a site before buying a product that had already been searched for, or clicked on, or even added to a cart. In these cases, it sends an email to customers reminding them of those items, with options for other follow-ups, in the event that the choice was due to being distracted or having second thoughts that might be persuaded otherwise.

Users can opt-out of these, but they can be useful given the genuine distraction exercise that is browsing online — with all of the unrelated notifications, plus other options for considering a purchase. Tellingly, ActiveCampaign integrates with 850 different apps, a measure of just how fragmented the online landscape is, and also how many ways your attention might be distracted, or snagged depending on your perspective.

Abandoned carts can cost a company, in aggregate, a lot of lost revenue, yet chasing those down is not the kind of task that a company would typically assign to a valuable employee to carry out. And that’s where companies like ActiveCampaign come in.

This, plus some 500 other actions like it around sales and marketing campaigns — Vandenboom calls them “recipes” — some of which have been contributed by ActiveCampaign’s own users, form the basis of the company’s platform.

The marketing and sales automation market is estimated to be worth billions of dollars today, and, thanks to the rise of social media and simply more places to spend time online (and more time spent online) is expected to be worth more than $8 billion by 2027, so it’s going after a lucrative and much-used tool for doing business online. (And others are looking at it as well, of couse, including newer entrants like Shopify coming from a different angle to the same problem. Shopify today is a valued partner of the company, Vandeboom said when I asked him about it.)

That gives ActiveCampaign not just a big opportunity to continue targeting, but possibly also makes it a target itself, for an acquisition.

The other key aspect of ActiveCampaign’s growth that is worth watching is related to its customers. While the company has a client base that includes recognized names like the Museum of Science and Industry based out of ActiveCampaign’s hometown, it also has some 145,000 others across nearly 200 countries with a big emphasis on small and medium businesses.

SMBs form the vast majority of all businesses globally, collectively representing a huge win for tech companies that can capture them as customers. But traditionally, they have proven to be a challenging sector, given that they cover so many different verticals, are in many ways more price-sensitive than their enterprise-sized counterparts, among other factors.

So for ActiveCampaign to have found successful traction with SMBs — including with pricing that works for many of them (using it starts at $9 for accounts with less than 500 contacts) — is likely another reason why the startup has caught the eye of investors keen to back winning horses.

While the company did not need to raise money, Vandeboom said he “saw it as an opportunity to bring in more partners, saying that investors like how it purposely went after the idea of customer experience not on vertical or locale.”

News: Gogoro partners with India’s Hero MotoCorp, one of the world’s largest two-wheel vehicle makers

• April 21, 2021
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Electric scooters powered by Gogoro’s swappable, rechargeable batteries now account for nearly a quarter of monthly sales in Taiwan, its home market. But one of the most frequent questions co-founder and chief executive officer Horace Luke gets asked is when will Gogoro launch its scooters in other countries. “I always said, ‘we’re getting ready, we’re

Electric scooters powered by Gogoro’s swappable, rechargeable batteries now account for nearly a quarter of monthly sales in Taiwan, its home market. But one of the most frequent questions co-founder and chief executive officer Horace Luke gets asked is when will Gogoro launch its scooters in other countries.

“I always said, ‘we’re getting ready, we’re getting ready, we’re getting ready,” he told TechCrunch. Gogoro answered that question today by announcing a strategic partnership with Hero MotoCorp, one of the world’s largest two-wheeled vehicle maker and the market leader in India, where it is headquartered.

Gogoro and Hero MotoCorp’s agreement includes a joint venture to build a battery swapping network in India. Hero MotoCorp will also launch electric two-wheelers based on Gogoro technology under its own brand. This will mark the first time the company has launched electric vehicles. (The partnership is not to be confused with Hero Electric, which is run by relatives of Hero MotoCorp’s founders, but is a separate company).

The deal will focus on India before expanding into Hero MotoCorp’s other markets (it serves a total of 40 countries). Details, like the first vehicle, launch cities and pricing, will be announced later, but Luke said Gogoro and Hero MotoCorp “are deploying very rapidly.”

Luke described the strategic partnership as a validation of Gogoro’s goal to become a battery swapping and smart mobility platform, packaging its technology as a turnkey solution for companies that want to produce energy-efficient vehicles.

“We designed our technology, capabilities and business model in the hope that one day we can solicit a giant like Hero,” said Luke.

The first Gogoro Smartscooter was launched in 2015. Since then, it has struck partnerships with manufacturers like Yamaha, PGO and A-Motor to build electric scooters with its technology under their own brands, but Gogoro’s international rollout has been very gradual: for example, a delivery fleet in South Korea and a partnership with the now-defunct scooter-sharing service Coup in Europe. Its first product launch in the United States was for Eeyo, its electric bike brand, instead of scooters.

Gogoro and Hero MotoCorp have been talking for more than a year and Luke described the the strategic partnership as one of the most important deals the company has made so far.

“In order to make a massive change, we need really massive adoption, and Taiwan has served really well as a pilot market for us to develop technology, refine it and show the world that it is possible, through this swap-and-go technology rather than tethered plug-and-charge scenario, for lightweight personal mobility to take off,” said Luke.

But India is obviously a much larger market, in terms of geography and population, than Taiwan. The Indian government wants to put more electric vehicles on the road with subsidy programs, and the high cost of fuel in the country is another incentive for people to make the switch from gas to electric. One major barrier for many consumers, however, is “range anxiety,” or concerns about how long their electric vehicle can run on a charge.

This is why Gogoro and Hero MotoCorp’s swapping station joint venture is important. In Taiwan, Gogoro now has more than 375,000 riders and 2,000 battery swapping/charging stations, which handle 265,000 swaps a day. That density is a key selling point because riders can find a nearby swapping station quickly through Gogoro’s smartphone app.

Gogoro’s batteries and charging stations are connected to its Gogoro Network cloud service, which monitors the condition of battery and manages how quickly they are charged. This allows the batteries to last longer–Luke said that the company has not retired any of its Smart Batteries in six years. Data from the Gogoro Network also shows the company where it needs to place more stations. In India, Gogoro and Hero MotoCorp will start with densely-populated areas, before adding stations based on demand, similar to Gogoro’s approach to its network in Taiwan.

After India, Gogoro and Hero MotoCorp plan to enter other markets, furthering Gogoro’s international expansion.

“What is really important about this partnership is their influence on the two-wheel market, and the importance of the two-wheel market in emerging markets,” said Luke.

In a press statement, Hero MotoCorp chairman and CEO Dr. Pawan Munjal said the strategic partnership is an extension of the research and development has already put into creating an electric vehicle portfolio.

“Today marks another major milestone in our journey, as we bring Hero’s leadership in two-wheelers, our global scale and innovation powerhouse, with the leadership of Gogoro in the swapping business model, as they have demonstrated over the years in Taiwan and the rest of the world,” Munjal added.

 

News: Orca AI, which puts computer vision onto cargo ships, raises $13M Series A funding

• April 21, 2021
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Tel Aviv’s Orca AI, a computer vision startup that can be retrofitted to cargo ships and improve navigation and collision avoidance, has raised $13 million in a Series A funding, taking its total raised to over $15.5 million. While most cargo ships carry security cameras, computer vision cameras are rare. Orca AI hopes its solution could introduce autonomous

Tel Aviv’s Orca AI, a computer vision startup that can be retrofitted to cargo ships and improve navigation and collision avoidance, has raised $13 million in a Series A funding, taking its total raised to over $15.5 million. While most cargo ships carry security cameras, computer vision cameras are rare. Orca AI hopes its solution could introduce autonomous guidance to vessels already at sea.

There are over 4,000 annual marine incidents, largely due to human error. The company says this is getting worse as the Coronavirus pandemic makes it harder for regular crew changes. The recent events in the Suez Canal have highlighted how crucial this industry is.

The funding round was led by OCV Partners, with Principal Zohar Loshitzer joining Orca AI’s board. Mizmaa Ventures and Playfair Capital also featured.

The company was founded by naval technology experts, Yarden Gross and Dor Raviv. The latter is an former Israel navy computer vision expert. Customers include Kirby, Ray Car Carriers and NYK.

Orca AI’s AI-based navigation and vessel tracking system supports ships in difficult to tricky to navigate situations and congested waterways, using vision sensors, thermal and low light cameras, plus algorithms that look at the environment and alert crews to dangerous situations.

On the raise, Yarden Gross, CEO, and co-founder said: “The maritime industry… is still far behind aviation with technological innovations. Ships deal with increasingly congested waterways, severe weather and low-visibility conditions creating difficult navigation experiences with often expensive cargo… Our solution provides unique insight and data to any ship in the world, helping to reduce these challenging situations and collisions in the future.” 

Zohar Loshitzer, Principal from OCV added: “Commercial shipping has historically been a highly regulated and traditional industry. However, we are now “witnessing a positive change in the adoption of tech solutions to increase safety and efficiency.

News: Samsung opens beta on Galaxy Upcycling to breathe new life into old phones

• April 21, 2021
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Samsung announced Galaxy Upcycling a few years back, but has largely been quiet on that front, aside from some stage time at CES back in January. Today the company announced that Upcycling at Home is being opened to beta today for users in the U.S., Korea and the U.K. It’s a pretty novel program, in

Samsung announced Galaxy Upcycling a few years back, but has largely been quiet on that front, aside from some stage time at CES back in January. Today the company announced that Upcycling at Home is being opened to beta today for users in the U.S., Korea and the U.K.

It’s a pretty novel program, in a world where consumers are encouraged to scrap their old devices every two to three years for something shiny and new. The program is designed to breathe new life into handsets that might otherwise be tossed in a landfill or stashed away in a drawer.

“We are rethinking how we use existing resources, and we believe the key to upcycling is to enable solutions that transform old technology into something new by adding value,” VP Sung-Koo Kim said in a release tied to the news. “We are committed to integrating sustainable practices into our day-to-day lives, and through Galaxy Upcycling at Home, users can join our journey toward a more sustainable future.”

Specifically, the products can be revamped into smart home devices, like childcare and pet monitors.

The feature can be accessed within the SmartThings Labs feature found in Samsung’s SmartThings App. When enabled, the product can send alerts when things like a crying baby or barking dog are detected. The recorded sound will be sent as part of the alert. Another feature uses built-in sensors to turn on a room’s lights when things get dark. The service will optimize device battery so it can operate for an extended period while detecting these inputs.

 

News: UK startup Causal raises $4.2M to kill Excel with a better number-crunching app

• April 21, 2021
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Excel and Google Sheets can only address pure ‘number crunching’ in a limited way. A new UK startup, Causal hopes to tackle this issue and has now raised a $4.2 million seed round led by Accel. Existing investors Coatue, Passion Capital, Verissimo Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Varadh Jain and others, also participated. The raise brings Causal’s

Excel and Google Sheets can only address pure ‘number crunching’ in a limited way. A new UK startup, Causal hopes to tackle this issue and has now raised a $4.2 million seed round led by Accel. Existing investors Coatue, Passion Capital, Verissimo Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Varadh Jain and others, also participated. The raise brings Causal’s total funding to $5.5 million, which the company will use to grow the engineering team and launch on Product Hunt next month.

Despite the fact that spreadsheets are crucial to normal business operations, there are multiple use cases for sales teams, finances teams etc, all of which are very different. Causal hopes to address these with a more data-driven, collaborative approach.

Founded in 2019 by Taimur Abdaal and Lukas Koebis, Causal is “aiming to replace Excel” by starting with the spreadsheet’s foundation: formulas”. Causal says its formulas “read like plain English” such “as Profit = Revenue – Costs” and also claims it typically takes “100x fewer formulas” in Causal to build exactly the same model in Excel.

“Business planning and forecasting should involve every team in a company, but the complexity of spreadsheets means that it’s often siloed within finance,” said Taimur Abdaal, CEO and co-founder in a statement. “We want to democratize this process with a truly horizontal product that every knowledge worker can use, and we’re excited to have Accel join us on the next phase of our journey.”

Over a call Abdaal told me: “We started really because we saw how difficult it is to actually work with numbers and spreadsheets. You have these esoteric formulas that are really hard to understand which is why something like 80% of spreadsheets have errors in them. Spreadsheets are also really disconnected from the other tools that companies use. Finance teams typically spend days with everyone manually pulling in data from accounting systems. So, these are some of the problems that we’re trying to solve. Right now we are a pretty small team of five, mostly engineers, and we’re really focused on building a very horizontal product that every team in a company can use for number crunching. As a seed investment it’s really, really nice because it lets us double down on some of the traction that we’ve gotten.”

“Many of us have felt the pain that comes with building and managing large spreadsheets across teams and data sources firsthand,” added Seth Pierrepont, Partner at Accel. “Taimur and Lukas are talented, product-focused founders who have taken the intuitive Excel-like interface that we’re all familiar with, and supercharged it with data integrations, collaboration features, and high-quality visualizations. Beyond that, they’ve leveraged their data science and mathematics backgrounds to offer sophisticated models out of the box, giving all users the ability to harness much more powerful predictive capabilities.”