Monthly Archives: April 2021

News: Tiger Global just closed one of the biggest venture funds ever, with $6.7 billion

• April 1, 2021
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If you watch funding announcements as we do, you may have noticed something this year. There are a lot of mega-rounds coming together, and Tiger Global is involved in a notable number of them, often as the round’s co-lead. Just this week alone, half a dozen companies have announced rounds that the New York-based investing

If you watch funding announcements as we do, you may have noticed something this year. There are a lot of mega-rounds coming together, and Tiger Global is involved in a notable number of them, often as the round’s co-lead.

Just this week alone, half a dozen companies have announced rounds that the New York-based investing giant has led, co-led, or written follow-on checks into, including HighRadius, a company whose $300 million Series C round it co-led with D1 Capital; Cityblock Health, whose $192 million in extended Series C funding Tiger Global led; and 6sense, which received a follow-on check from Tiger Global as part of a $125 million Series D round.

The firm is also reportedly reportedly in talks to co-lead a $300 million round in a five-year-old, AI chipmaker called Groq.

If you’re wondering where all that money is coming from, wonder no longer. Though Tiger Global sent a letter to its investors back in January, saying was raising $3.75 billion for its thirteenth venture fund (titled XIV, apparently for superstitious reasons), a new SEC filing shows that new fund just closed with almost twice that amount: $6.65 billion.

That’s a lot of billions, even in this market, and especially for Tiger Global, which closed its 12th fund with $3.75 billion in capital commitments only last year.

We’ve reached out to the firm to learn more, but as we noted back in January, when we caught wind of its fundraising plans, Tiger Global seemingly had a strong case to present potential limited partners.

Among its most recent reasons to celebrate, portfolio company Stripe is now valued at $95 billion, following closing a $600 million round earlier this month. Tiger Global also owned 10% of the gaming company Roblox ahead of direct listing that it staged earlier this month to become a publicly traded outfit. The company’s market cap is currently $38 billion.

In 2020, numerous of its portfolio companies also either went public or were acquired, including Yatsen Holding, the nearly five-year-old parent company of China-based cosmetics giant Perfect Diary; the cloud-based data warehousing outfit Snowflake; and Root insurance, a nearly six-year-old, Columbus, Ohio-based insurance company.

As for M&A, Tiger Global saw at least three of its companies swallowed by bigger tech companies last year, including Postmates’s all-stock sale to Uber for $2.65 billion; Credit Karma’s $7 billion sale in cash and stock to Intuit; and the sale of Kustomer, which focused on customer service platforms and chatbots, for $1 billion to Facebook.

Tiger Global, whose roots are in hedge fund management, launched its private equity business in 2003, spearheaded by Chase Coleman, who’d previously worked for hedge-fund pioneer Julian Robertson at Tiger Management; and Scott Shleifer, who joined the firm in 2002 after spending three years with the Blackstone Group. Lee Fixel, who would become a key contributor in the business, joined in 2006.

Shleifer focused on China, Fixel focused on India and the rest of the firm’s support team (it now has 22 investing professionals on staff) helped find deals in Brazil and Russia before beginning to focus more aggressively on opportunities in the U.S.

Every investing decision was eventually made by each of the three. Fixel left in 2019 to launch his own investment firm, Addition. Now Shleifer and Coleman are the firm’s sole decision-makers.

Tiger Global’s investors include a mix of sovereign wealth funds, foundations, endowments, pensions and its own employees, who are collectively believed to be the firm’s biggest investors at this point.

Some of Tiger Global’s biggest wins to date have included a $200 million bet on the e-commerce giant JD.com that produced a $5 billion for the firm. According to the WSJ, it also cleared more than $1 billion on the Chinese online-services platform Meituan, which went public in 2018.

The firm also reaped a massive windfall through its investment in the connected fitness company Peloton, 20% of which the firm owned at the time of Peloton’s 2019 IPO.

News: ILM shows off the new Stagecraft LED wall used for season 2 of ‘The Mandalorian’

• April 1, 2021
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The first season of “The Mandalorian” last year wasn’t just a great show, it was the result of an entirely new paradigm in film and TV production. Stagecraft, the enormous LED-wall volume ILM used to shoot that season has since been expanded and updated to be better, faster and easier to use. In a behind-the-scenes

The first season of “The Mandalorian” last year wasn’t just a great show, it was the result of an entirely new paradigm in film and TV production. Stagecraft, the enormous LED-wall volume ILM used to shoot that season has since been expanded and updated to be better, faster and easier to use.

In a behind-the-scenes video, directors and others from the production weigh in on how the system makes everything easier, and enumerate the improvements for the 2.0 version.

The most recognizable piece of Stagecraft is “the volume,” an enormous space inside a two stories and a roof of high-resolution LED-based displays. With physical sets placed in the center, the feeling of being in a larger space is real — and if you shoot it right, you can’t tell a virtual background from a real one.

Fundamentally this is huge, allowing “on location” shoots to combine with intricate sets (and regardless of weather or travel schedules), but far more gracefully than the soundstages or portable green screens that actors have stood in front of for decades. Not only that but it pulls together many disparate parts of the production process into one shared process.

“What’s wonderful about this system is now everyone is on the same page,” said Robert Rodriguez, who directed several episodes of the show (as well as numerous films), in the ILM video. “It inspires the actors, it inspires the filmmaker to now see what they’re shooting. You know, it’s like you’re painting with the lights on finally.”

But while it would be difficult to call Stagecraft anything but a rousing success, it’s still very much a work in progress. As an end-to-end system it must integrate with dozens of renderers, color suites, cameras, pre- and post-production software, and of course the LED walls themselves, which are always improving.

Image Credits: ILM

“By the second season, ILM developed some software that was specific to this technology and to what the hardware was capable of,” said Jon Favreau, executive producer of the show and indefatigable patron of new technology in cinema.

There were lots of specific requests from various members of the team, plus the usual bug squashing and performance improvements, leading to an improved workflow. Plus the volume itself has gotten bigger and better.

“It also has forced us into having a more efficient workflow that draws pre-production, post-production, production, all into one continuous pipeline,” Favreau said. Not only is it more natural and better looking than ordinary location or green screen techniques, it’s faster — they’re working through 30%-50% more script pages per day, which any producer will tell you is unbelievable.

I plan to dig deeper into the technical improvements and pipelines that ILM, Disney, Unreal and other companies have put together to make this all possible. In the meantime you can watch the behind the scenes video below:

News: Bring CISOs into the C-suite to bake cybersecurity into company culture

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Cyber strategy and company strategy are inextricably linked. Consequently, chief information security officers (CISOs) in the C-Suite will be just as common and influential as CFOs in maximizing shareholder value.

When you think of the core members of the C-suite, you probably think of the usual characters: CEO, CFO, COO and maybe a CMO. Each of these roles is fairly well defined: The CEO controls strategy and ultimately answers to the board; the CFO manages budgets; the CMO gets people to buy more, more often; the COO keeps everything running smoothly. Regardless of the role, all share the same objective: maximize shareholder value.

But the information age is shaking up the C-suite’s composition. The cyber market is exploding in an attempt to secure the modern enterprise: multicloud environments, data generated and stored faster than anyone can keep up with and SaaS applications powering virtually every function across the org, in addition to new types of security postures that coincide with that trend. Whatever the driver, though, this all adds up to the fact that cyber strategy and company strategy are inextricably linked. Consequently, chief information security officers (CISOs) in the C-Suite will be just as common and influential as CFOs in maximizing shareholder value.

It’s the early ’90s. A bank heist. A hacker. St. Petersburg and New York City. Offshore bank accounts. Though it sounds like the synopsis of the latest psychological thriller, this is the context for the appointment of the first CISO in 1994.

A hacker in Russia stole $10 million from Citi clients’ accounts by typing away at a keyboard in a dimly lit apartment across the Atlantic. Steve Katz, a security executive, was poached from JP Morgan to join Citi as part of the C-suite to respond to the crisis. His title? CISO.

After he joined, he was told two critical things: First, he would have a blank check to set up a security program to prevent this from happening again, and second, Citi would publicize the hack one month after he started. Katz flew over 200,000 miles during the next few months, visiting corporate treasurers and heads of finance to reassure them their funds were secure. While the impetus for the first CISO was a literal bank heist, the $10 million stolen pales in comparison to what CISOs are responsible for protecting today.

News: QuikNode is building a blockchain developer cloud platform to compete with AWS

• April 1, 2021
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As hot as the blockchain space appears to be these days, it’s still far from simple to get a decentralized application reliably up-and-running. The NFT boom and rising cryptocurrency prices have brought more attention to applications running on the blockchain, but the dominant cloud service platforms aren’t quite ready to make a full-commit to the

As hot as the blockchain space appears to be these days, it’s still far from simple to get a decentralized application reliably up-and-running. The NFT boom and rising cryptocurrency prices have brought more attention to applications running on the blockchain, but the dominant cloud service platforms aren’t quite ready to make a full-commit to the needs of these budding developers.

QuikNode, which recently raised funding from Y Combinator and is in the process of wrapping its seed funding, has been building out a Web3 cloud platform for blockchain developers that can help them create and scale applications. The startup seems to be further along than most of its fellow YC batch mates, founded back in 2017.

At the moment, running a decentralized app can involve a lot of base infrastructure headaches that take developer attention away from their actual products. The initial setup can require days worth of downloads to sync to these networks for the first time while maintenance costs can also be high, the startup says. QuikNode allows app developers to rent access to nodes that let them operate on the blockchain network of their choice, enabling them to sidestep maintaining and monitoring their own node.

Alongside node management and maintenance, QuikNode’s product integrates developer tools and analytics to simplify running a decentralized app. The challenge for QuikNode will likely be maintaining an edge here in the shadow of cloud giants if the decentralized app market grows to a sizable (and consistent) presence on the web. QuikNode is itself a customer of these large cloud companies, opting to focus on software rather than building up physical data centers, nevertheless they’re still directly competing with these big players.

“I think we have about two years on Amazon, we’re on their radar,” CEO Dmitry Shklovsky tells TechCrunch.

For the time being, QuikNode’s small size gives it a distinct pricing advantage compared to nascent programs from other cloud providers. Plans start at just $9 for users launching the most basic applications, with structured plans increasing depending on the amount of “method calls” being performed. Renting a dedicated node is $300 per month. From there, the startup offers several chain-specific add-ons with options like Archive mode that give applications access all historical value states inside smart contracts on the network or Trace mode, which lets developers request nodes to re-execute transactions.

The team currently operates over 1,000 nodes and has around 400 customers. As QuikNode aims to scale their customer base, Shklovsky says that one of the best paths to customer acquisition have been guides educating decentralized app developers on how to connect to the most popular networks. 

Currently, the largely Miami-based team supports networks on six chains including Ethereum, Bitcoin, xDai, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon and Optimism.

News: US iPhone users spent an average of $138 on apps in 2020, will grow to $180 in 2021

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U.S. consumers spent an average of $138 on iPhone apps last year, an increase of 38% year over year, largely driven by the pandemic impacts, according to new data from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Throughout 2020, consumers turned to iPhone apps for work, school, entertainment, shopping and more, driving per-user spending to a

U.S. consumers spent an average of $138 on iPhone apps last year, an increase of 38% year over year, largely driven by the pandemic impacts, according to new data from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Throughout 2020, consumers turned to iPhone apps for work, school, entertainment, shopping and more, driving per-user spending to a new record and the greatest annual growth since 2016, when it had then popped by 42% year over year.

Sensor Tower tells TechCrunch it expects the trend of increased consumer spend to continue in 2021, when it projects consumer spend per active iPhone in the U.S. to reach an average of $180. This will again be tied, at least in part, to the lift caused by the pandemic — and, particularly, the lift in pandemic-fueled spending on mobile games.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Last year’s increased spending on iPhone apps in the U.S. mirrored global trends, which saw consumers spend a record $111 billion on both iOS and Android apps, per Sensor Tower, and $143 billion, per App Annie, whose analysis had also included some third-party Android app stores in China.

In terms of where U.S. iPhone consumer spending was focused in 2020, the largest category was, of course, gaming.

In the U.S., per-device spending on mobile games grew 43% year over year from $53.80 in 2019 to $76.80 in 2020. That’s more than 20 points higher than the 22% growth seen between 2018 and 2019, when in-game spending grew from $44 to $53.80.

U.S. users spent the most money on puzzle games, like Candy Crush Saga and Gardenscapes, which may have helped to take people’s minds off the pandemic and its related stresses. That category averaged $15.50 per active iPhone, followed by casino games, which averaged $13.10, and was driven by physical casinos closures. Strategy games also saw a surge in spending in 2020, growing to an average of $12.30 per iPhone user spending.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Another big category for in-app spending was Entertainment. With theaters and concerts shut down, consumers turned to streaming apps in larger numbers. Disney+ launched in late 2019, just months ahead of the pandemic lockdowns and HBO Max soon followed in May 2020.

Average per-device spending in this category was second-highest, at $10.20, up 26% from the $8.10 spent in 2019. For comparison, per-device spending had only grown by 1% between 2018 and 2019.

Other categories in the top five by per-device spending included Photo & Video (up 56% to $9.80), Social Networking (up 41% to $7.90) and Lifestyle (up 14% to $6.50).

These increases were tied to apps like TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch. Twitch saw 680% year-over-year revenue growth in 2020 on U.S. iPhones, specifically. TikTok, meanwhile, saw 140% growth. In the Lifestyle category, dating apps were driving growth as consumers looked to connect with others virtually during lockdowns, while bars and clubs were closed.

Overall, what made 2020 unique was not necessarily what apps people where using, but how often they were being used and how much was being spent.

App Annie had earlier pointed out that the pandemic accelerated mobile adoption by two to three years’ time. And Sensor Tower today tells us that the industry didn’t see the same sort of “seasonality” around spending in certain types of apps, and particularly games, last year — even though, pre-pandemic, there are typically slower parts of the year for spending. That was not the case in 2020, when any time was a good time to spend on apps.

News: Knowing when your startup should go all-in on business development

• April 1, 2021
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There’s a persistent fallacy swirling around that any startup growing pain or scaling problem can be solved with business development. That’s frankly not true.

There’s a persistent fallacy swirling around that any startup growing pain or scaling problem can be solved with business development. That’s frankly not true.

Business development is rarely, if ever, the solution to succeeding in a crowded industry, differentiating an offering or delivering a truly exceptional customer experience. But standing up an effective BD operation that brings in sustainable revenue and helps validate product-market fit can be the difference between survival and failure for a startup.

I’ve had the opportunity to lead business development functions at three companies experiencing three very different stages of growth: Yelp, Stitcher and TrialPay.

At Yelp, I served as vice president of business development and corporate development for seven years. The business development team I was brought in to lead was a core business unit with accountability to the COO, CEO and board. During my tenure, I was involved in securing around 200 partnerships with companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Samsung, as well as with scores of organizations ranging from early-stage startups to corporate giants.

Yelp was on its way to becoming a go-to source of information and customer value before I arrived. But partnerships like the one I secured with Apple made Yelp into a global market leader.

At Stitcher, I took on business development as central to my role as a company founder. While it may seem like an early phase to go all-in on BD, the partnerships with music and media companies that I orchestrated in the earliest days were essential to the company’s very survival. Stitcher is an example of a company where early BD investment made sense because of the dual importance of brand name involvement in concept validation and rising above podcast market congestion.

At TrialPay, an e-commerce platform acquired by Visa in 2015, there was already an established founding team and business model to involve customers in the marketing and payment of offerings by the time I showed up. In fact, I was brought in to run business development because the company was approaching an inflection point: There was pressure internally from investors and externally from customers to expand TrialPay’s network of merchants in order to diversify commercial offerings more rapidly.

The need for business development was directly tied to consumer demand and the company’s own position between growth funding rounds.

When to go all-in on BD — and when to avoid it

There are certain market conditions that make it smart for companies to invest in BD as a growth engine and others that signal it’s best to place money, talent and time elsewhere.

You should invest in business development early when your startup’s early success depends on it. For example, at Stitcher, we wanted — and perhaps needed — early buy-in from large media companies who created the podcast content we were going to feature. We didn’t want to get in the same murky legal territory early music startups had gotten into, like Napster.

News: Put your city on the TC map — TechCrunch’s European Cities Survey 2021

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TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey European founders and investors in cities outside the larger European capitals. Over the next few weeks, we will ask entrepreneurs in these cities to talk about their ecosystems, in their own words. This is your chance to put your city on the Techcrunch Map! This

TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey European founders and investors in cities outside the larger European capitals.

Over the next few weeks, we will ask entrepreneurs in these cities to talk about their ecosystems, in their own words.

This is your chance to put your city on the Techcrunch Map!

This is the follow-up to the huge survey of investors (see also below) we’ve done over the last 6 or more months, largely in capital cities.

These formed part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing regularly for ExtraCrunch, our subscription service which unpacks key issues for startups and investors.

In the first wave of surveys (as you can see below) the cities we wrote about were largely capitals.

This time, we will be surveying founders and investors in Europe’s other cities to capture how European hubs are growing, from the perspective of the people on the ground.

We’d like to know how your city’s startup scene is evolving, how the tech sector is being impacted by COVID-19, and generally how your city will evolve.

We leave submissions mostly un-edited, and generally looking for at least one or two paragraphs in answers to the questions.

So if you are tech startup founder or investor in one of these cities please fill out our survey form here.

Austria: Graz, Linz
Belgium: Antwerp
Croatia: Zagreb, Osjek
Czech Republic: Brno, Ostrava, Plzen
England: Bristol, Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester
Estonia: Tartu
France: Toulouse, Lyon, Lille
Germany: Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Bielefeld, Frankfurt
Greece: Thessaloniki
Ireland: Cork
Israel: Jerusalem
Italy: Trieste, Bologna, Turin, Florence, Milan
Netherlands: Delft, Eindhoven, Rotterdam, Utrecht
Northern Ireland: Belfast, Derry
Poland: Gdańsk, Wroclaw, Krakow, Poznan
Portugal: Porto, Braga
Romania: Cluj, Lasi, Timisoara, Oradea, Brasov
Scotland: Edinburgh, Glasgow
Spain: Valencia
Sweden: Malmo
Switzerland: Geneva, Lausanne

Thank you for participating. If you have questions you can email mike@techcrunch.com and/or reply on Twitter to @mikebutcher

Here are the cities that previously participated in The Great TechCrunch Survey of Europe’s VCs:

Amsterdam/Netherlands

Athens/Greece

Berlin/Germany

Brussels/Belgium

Bucharest/Romania

Copenhagen/Denmark

Dublin/Ireland

Helsinki/Finland

Lisbon/Portugal

London/UK

Madrid & Barcelona/Spain (Part 1 & Part 2)

Oslo/Norway

Paris/France

Prague/Czech Republic

Rome, Milan/Italy

Stockholm/Sweden

Tel Aviv/Israel

Vienna/Austria

Warsaw/Poland (Part 1 & Part 2)

Zurich/Switzerland

News: Soda monitors data and helps you fix issues before it’s too late

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Meet Soda, a data monitoring platform that is going to help you discover issues with your data processing setup. This way, you can react as quickly as possible and make sure that you keep the full data picture. If you’re building a digital-first company, you and your customers are likely generating a ton of data.

Meet Soda, a data monitoring platform that is going to help you discover issues with your data processing setup. This way, you can react as quickly as possible and make sure that you keep the full data picture.

If you’re building a digital-first company, you and your customers are likely generating a ton of data. And you may even be leveraging that data to adjust your product itself — think about hotel pricing, finding the right restaurant on a food delivery website, applying for a loan with a fintech company, etc. Those are data-heavy products.

“Companies build a data platform — as they call it — in one of the big three clouds [Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure]. They land their data in there and they make it available for analytics and more,” Soda co-founder and CEO Maarten Masschelein told me.

You can then tap into those data lakes or data warehouses to display analytics, visualize your data, monitor your services, etc. But what happens if there’s an issue in your data workflows?

It might take you a while to realize that there’s some missing data, or that you’re miscounting some stuff. For instance, Facebook miscalculated average video view times for several years. When you spot that issue, an important part of your business might be affected.

Soda wants to catch data issues as quickly as possible by monitoring your data automatically and at scale. “We sit further upstream, closer to the source of data,” Masschelein said.

When you set up Soda with your data platform, you instantly get some alerts. Soda tells you if there’s something off. For example, if your application generated only 6,000 records today while you usually generate 24,000 records in 24 hours, chances are there’s something wrong. Or if you usually get a new entry every minute and there hasn’t been an entry in 15 minutes, your data might not be fresh.

“But that only covers a small part of what is considered data issues. There’s more logic that you want to test and validate,” Masschelein said.

Soda lets you create rules to test and validate your data. Basically, think about test suite in software development. When you build a new version of your app, your code needs to pass several tests to make sure that nothing critical is going to break with the new version.

With Soda, you can check data immediately and get the result. If the test doesn’t pass, you can programmatically react — for instance, you can stop a process and quarantine data.

Today, the startup is also launching Soda Cloud. It’s a collaboration web application that gives you visibility in your data flows across the organization. This way, non-technical people can easily browse metadata to see whether everything seems to be flowing correctly.

Basically, Soda customers use Soda SQL, a command-line tool that helps someone scan data, along with Soda Cloud, a web application to view Soda SQL results.

Beyond those products, Soda’s vision is that data is becoming an entire category in software products. Development teams now have a ton of dev tools available to automate testing, integration, deployment, versioning, etc. But there’s a lot of potential for tools specifically designed for data teams.

Soda has recently raised a $13.5 million Series A round (€11.5 million) led by Singular, a new Paris-based VC fund that I covered earlier this week. Soda’s seed investors Point Nine Capital, Hummingbird Ventures, DCF and various business angels also participated.

News: Buy a pass to Disrupt 2021 and get a free Extra Crunch membership

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Are you ready to do whatever it takes to move the needle and drive your startup forward? Then you’re ready for TechCrunch Disrupt 2021. The leading tech conference focused on founders takes place September 21-23. There’s nothing like the thrill that comes from discovering early-stage startups and Disrupt is the world’s top launch platform. The

Are you ready to do whatever it takes to move the needle and drive your startup forward? Then you’re ready for TechCrunch Disrupt 2021. The leading tech conference focused on founders takes place September 21-23. There’s nothing like the thrill that comes from discovering early-stage startups and Disrupt is the world’s top launch platform.

The three days of Disrupt 2021 will be jam-packed not only with experts, panel discussions, exhibitors and the leading tech makers, shakers and investors from around the globe — it’ll be packed with value and opportunity.

Let’s talk value. Right out of the gate, you’ll receive a 3-month membership to Extra Crunch — free — when you purchase a Disrupt pass (excluding the Expo Pass). That’s a $45 value-add.

Extra Crunch, a members-only community created by TechCrunch, is specifically designed to help founders and startup teams get and stay ahead. You’ll enjoy articles on startup investment trends, fundraising, late-stage startups and more. You’ll receive weekly startup investor surveys, private tech market analysis, how-tos on fundraising and growth, topical newsletters and other exclusives delivered daily.

Membership also entitles you to Extra Crunch Live, our weekly virtual event series, discounts on TechCrunch events, discounts from software partners and more. Whew — that should keep your fingers on the pulse of everything startup.

Let’s talk even more value. Take advantage of super early-bird pricing on Founder, Innovator and Investor passes, and you can attend Disrupt 2021 for less than $100. But don’t procrastinate. Buy your pass before this time-sensitive offer disappears on May 13, 11:59 pm (PST).

Let’s talk opportunity. You’ll find it in every corner of Disrupt. Whether you’re networking on the fly in our virtual platform’s chat feature or curating your own meetings using CrunchMatch, our AI-powered networking platform, you’ll connect with people eager to collaborate, educate, learn and inspire. It’s a great way to expand your network.

The all-new Startup Alley is ground zero for opportunity — exhibitors can gain valuable media exposure, attract customers, schedule product demos and track leads. Plus, the TechCrunch editorial team will choose two stand-out exhibiting startups to compete in Startup Battlefield for the $100,000 prize. And check out the new Startup Alley+ opportunity here. Exhibiting at Disrupt is an opportunity you don’t want to miss.

The world-famous Startup Battlefield pitch competition is another huge opportunity, and we’ll start accepting applications for the 2021 cohort in Q2.

Opportunity meets value at Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23. You’re ready to do whatever it takes, so jump on this chance to attend for less than $100. Buy your super early-bird pass before May 13, 11:59 pm (PST). Then sit back and enjoy that tasty, ExtraCrunch(y) membership.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

News: Starship Technologies CEO/CTO Ahti Heinla joins TC Sessions: Mobility 2021

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For obvious reasons, food delivery was among the categories that soared during a year of Covid-19 related lockdowns. The question remains how these changes will impact both grocery and restaurant delivery long-term, but at the very least, it seems certain that the categories have hit an inflection point. This could also be the moment that

For obvious reasons, food delivery was among the categories that soared during a year of Covid-19 related lockdowns. The question remains how these changes will impact both grocery and restaurant delivery long-term, but at the very least, it seems certain that the categories have hit an inflection point.

This could also be the moment that delivery robotics finally come into their own, as more services look beyond human messengers to plan for future pandemics and other potential issues.

It’s a moment Starship Technologies has been planning for since 2014. With around $100 million of funding under its belt, the company has already been testing its delivery robots in a number of different real-world markets. In January, it added another $17 million in funding to continue growing impressive growth that includes a five-fold increase in its fleet size since the beginning of the pandemic.

The company’s co-founder and CEO/CTO Ahti Heinla will join us at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 to discuss Starship’s role in the push for last-mile robotic delivery. It’s been a long road for the startup, and there’s still a ways to go, in dealing with everything from technology to regulatory red tape. We’ll discuss these challenges and whether the on-going pandemic will be the push these technologies need to become a more mainstream reality.

By late summer 2021, Starship Technologies plans to expand to 100 universities  – leaping from the 15 campuses it operated from at the beginning of this year. Not only that, but Starship Technology is growing in just about every meaningful way for startups, including delivery locations, number of deliveries, fleet size and workforce, which now is about 400 strong.

We can’t wait to hear from Ahti and more mobility-industry leaders at TC Sessions: Mobility on June 9. Make sure to grab your Early Bird pass before May 6 to save 35% on tickets and join the fun!