Monthly Archives: May 2021

News: Portside raises $17M for its business aviation management platform

• May 20, 2021
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Portside, an aviation startup that is building a platform for managing the backend of a corporate flight department, charter operation, government fleet and fractional ownership operation, today announced that it has raised a $17 million funding round led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from existing investors I2BF Global Ventures and SOMA Capital. The idea

Portside, an aviation startup that is building a platform for managing the backend of a corporate flight department, charter operation, government fleet and fractional ownership operation, today announced that it has raised a $17 million funding round led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from existing investors I2BF Global Ventures and SOMA Capital.

The idea behind Portside, which was founded in 2018, is that it lets business aviation companies and flight departments manage everything from flight operations to maintenance, crew and staff scheduling, expense management for crew members and staff, and financial data to help them operate more efficiently. It’s basically everything you need to run your flight department in a single solution, but it also integrates with virtually all of the existing scheduling, accounting, expense management and maintenance tools a flight department or fractional ownership operation is likely using today.

Image Credits: Portside

While the COVID pandemic put a halt to most forms of private aviation early on, that market saw a quick rebound. Portside says it saw its revenue grow almost 300% in 2020 and that it added more than 50 aircraft operators in multiple countries to its user base.

“This infusion of new capital will be used to accelerate investment in product innovation, support further engagement with large enterprise customers and grow our global engineering and customer success teams,” said Alek Vernitsky, co-founder and CEO of Portside. “We appreciate the strong support we have received from both our existing and new investors in this round. They have collectively demonstrated their confidence in our strategy and intentional approach to cloud-based digital transformation of the global business aviation industry.”

Portside is not alone in this market. Companies like Fl3xx, for example, offer similar solutions for flight departments and at the lower end, tools like Flight Circle offer a subset of these features for general aviation clubs and partnerships.

“Portside has progressed rapidly since inception and is entering the next stage of fulfilling its vision of becoming the undisputed leader in cloud-based solutions for business aviation,” stated John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global Management. “In our view, Portside represents the future of the industry, and we are pleased to partner with a company we believe will continue to create significant value for many years to come.”

News: Snap brings partner-centric Layers to its social map used by 250 million people

• May 20, 2021
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Snap wants users to get a more personal view of the world around them. While products like Google Maps and Apple Maps have long-relied on data partners to juice the quality of their contextual insights, Snap is hoping it can give users a more hands-on approach to mixing and matching third-party tie-ins to its Snap

Snap wants users to get a more personal view of the world around them.

While products like Google Maps and Apple Maps have long-relied on data partners to juice the quality of their contextual insights, Snap is hoping it can give users a more hands-on approach to mixing and matching third-party tie-ins to its Snap Map product, allowing users to build a view of their geographic surroundings that tailored to their interests.

The new product — announced today at the company’s Snap Partner Summit — is called Layers and it allows users to add data from some of Snap’s chosen developer partners directly to their map so they can see the world in a very particular view.

“Layers are how the Map evolves from a singular product to a platform,” Snap’s Bryant Detwiller tells TechCrunch. “Ultimately, we just want our map to be more useful.”

Snap Map has aimed to be a fundamentally social product, designed around people and friends rather than cars and directions, Layers will theoretically allow its users some customization in deciding what points-of-interest they want their map to be structured around.

The company says that Snap Map has some 250 million monthly active users.

Ticketmaster integration via Snap

Like Snap’s approach with its Wechat-like Minis and Games, it’s starting things off pretty slowly when it comes to partnerships. It has two out of the gate — a partnership with Ticketmaster and restaurant review site The Infatuation.

With the Ticketmaster Layer, users will be able to sort through shows at nearby concert venues and can get transferred from the Layer directly to a new Ticketmaster Mini to buy tickets inside the Snapchat app. With The Infatuation, users can scan the map for editorialized recommendations for nearby restaurants with lists and reviews from the site. More of these partnerships on the way, though it doesn’t sound like Snap is planning to open the floodgates to developers anytime soon.

News: Snap announces Story Studio, a new standalone app to edit stories

• May 20, 2021
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During Snap Partner Summit, Snap announced a brand new app focused on creators. Named Story Studio, this standalone iOS app gives you several editing tools so that you can make your content look as professional as possible. Story editing tools are still in Snapchat — nothing is changing on this front. But if you’ve been

During Snap Partner Summit, Snap announced a brand new app focused on creators. Named Story Studio, this standalone iOS app gives you several editing tools so that you can make your content look as professional as possible.

Story editing tools are still in Snapchat — nothing is changing on this front. But if you’ve been creating content for Spotlight, a TikTok-like feed, or if you’re a Snap star, you may need more powerful editing tools. Many creators choose to edit their stories on a computer.

But many creators also want to do everything on their phones. That’s why there are already a few powerful video editing tools out there. But Snap is making its own app so that it works better with Snapchat.

With Story Studio, you can see what’s trending on Snapchat already. It includes sounds, topics and lenses. This way, you can remix popular content and create your own take on the current meme.

Snap says that Story Studio lets you trim your shots with frame-precise editing. You can add captions, stickers and other visual elements. You can also take advantage of the company’s licensed music catalog.

And because it’s supposed to be a serious app for serious stories, you can save a project and edit it later.

When you’re done, you can share your video with Snapchat — you can use it to post a story or a Spotlight video. But Story Studio is also going to work with other platforms. You can save it to your camera roll or export your video to other apps on your phone.

Story Studio is launching later this year. It’s going to be available on iOS exclusively for now.

Image Credits: Snap

Send a gift to your favorite creator

While Snapchat started as an app to chat with your friends, it’s clear that the company now wants to attract a generation of creators with the right tools and monetization options. Creators have become a competitive space for social apps, such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube with YouTube Shorts and Snapchat.

Snap’s own take on short viral videos have been working relatively well so far. Spotlight reaches 125 million monthly active users on Snapchat. The number of users watching at least 10 minutes of Spotlight per day has grown by 70% between January and March.

In addition to Story Studio, Snap is launching a web platform for Spotlight. This way, people can watch Spotlight content without launching Snapchat even when they’re browsing the web on their desktop computer. It could be a way to attract new Snapchat users as well.

But creators in particular are going to like this website as you can upload videos to Spotlight from Chrome or Safari.

When it comes to monetization, Snap is distributing $1 million every day to Snapchat users who create the top Snaps for Spotlight — 5,400 creators have earned $130 million since November 2020. The company will stop giving away $1 million per day on June 1st. Snap only says it plans to give millions every month.

But creators will be able to start accepting gifts directly on Snapchat. When Snapchat users reply to a story, they can buy Snap Tokens and send them as a gift — a virtual item with real-life value. The company hasn’t detailed how it plans to split revenue between Snap and creators. Gifting will roll out on Android and iOS later this year.

News: Esper raises $30M Series B for its IoT DevOps platform

• May 20, 2021
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There may be billions of IoT devices in use today, but the tooling around building (and updating) the software for them still leaves a lot to be desired. Esper, which today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round, builds the tools to enable developers and engineers to deploy and manage fleets

There may be billions of IoT devices in use today, but the tooling around building (and updating) the software for them still leaves a lot to be desired. Esper, which today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round, builds the tools to enable developers and engineers to deploy and manage fleets of Android-based edge devices. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Root Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures and Haystack.

The company argues that there are thousands of device manufacturers who are building these kinds of devices on Android alone, but that scaling and managing these deployments comes with a lot of challenges. The core idea here is that Esper brings to device development the DevOps experience that software developers now expect. The company argues that its tools allow companies to forgo building their own internal DevOps teams and instead use its tooling to scale their Android-based IoT fleets for use cases that range from digital signage and kiosks to custom solutions in healthcare, retail, logistics and more.

“The pandemic has transformed industries like connected fitness, digital health, hospitality, and food delivery, further accelerating the adoption of intelligent edge devices. But with each new use case, better software automation is required,” said Yadhu Gopalan, CEO and co-founder at Esper. “Esper’s mature cloud infrastructure incorporates the functionality cloud developers have come to expect, re-imagined for devices.”

Image Credits: Esper

Mobile device management (MDM) isn’t exactly a new thing, but the Esper team argues that these tools weren’t created for this kind of use case. “MDMs are the solution now in the market. They are made for devices being brought into an environment,” Gopalan said. “The DNA of these solutions is rooted in protecting the enterprise and to deploy applications to them in the network. Our customers are sending devices out into the wild. It’s an entirely different use case and model.”

To address these challenges, Esper offers a range of tools and services that includes a full development stack for developers, cloud-based services for device management and hardware emulators to get started with building custom devices.

“Esper helped us launch our Fusion-connected fitness offering on three different types of hardware in less than six months,” said Chris Merli, founder at Inspire Fitness. “Their full stack connected fitness Android platform helped us test our application on different hardware platforms, configure all our devices over the cloud, and manage our fleet exactly to our specifications. They gave us speed, Android expertise, and trust that our application would provide a delightful experience for our customers.”

The company also offers solutions for running Android on older x86 Windows devices to extend the life of this hardware, too.

“We spent about a year and a half on building out the infrastructure,” said Gopalan. “Definitely. That’s the hard part and that’s really creating a reliable, robust mechanism where customers can trust that the bits will flow to the devices. And you can also roll back if you need to.”

Esper is working with hardware partners to launch devices that come with built-in Esper-support from the get-go.

Esper says it saw 70x revenue growth in the last year, an 8x growth in paying customers and a 15x growth in devices running Esper. Since we don’t know the baseline, those numbers are meaningless, but the investors clearly believe that Esper is on to something. Current customers include the likes of CloudKitchens, Spire Health, Intelity, Ordermark, Inspire Fitness, RomTech and Uber.

News: How to ensure quality in the era of Big Data

• May 20, 2021
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With the evident need for solutions to ensure high data quality in the Big Data era, the space has received a lot of attention — especially during the past year.

A little over a decade has passed since The Economist warned us that we would soon be drowning in data. The modern data stack has emerged as a proposed life-jacket for this data flood — spearheaded by Silicon Valley startups such as Snowflake, Databricks and Confluent.

Today, any entrepreneur can sign up for BigQuery or Snowflake and have a data solution that can scale with their business in a matter of hours. The emergence of cheap, flexible and scalable data storage solutions was largely a response to changing needs spurred by the massive explosion of data.

Currently, the world produces 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily (there are 18 zeros in a quintillion). The explosion of data continues in the roaring ‘20s, both in terms of generation and storage — the amount of stored data is expected to continue to double at least every four years. However, one integral part of modern data infrastructure still lacks solutions suitable for the Big Data era and its challenges: Monitoring of data quality and data validation.

Let me go through how we got here and the challenges ahead for data quality.

The value vs. volume dilemma of Big Data

In 2005, Tim O’Reilly published his groundbreaking article “What is Web 2.0?”, truly setting off the Big Data race. The same year, Roger Mougalas from O’Reilly introduced the term “Big Data” in its modern context  —  referring to a large set of data that is virtually impossible to manage and process using traditional BI tools.

Back in 2005, one of the biggest challenges with data was managing large volumes of it, as data infrastructure tooling was expensive and inflexible, and the cloud market was still in its infancy (AWS didn’t publicly launch until 2006). The other was speed: As Tristan Handy from Fishtown Analytics (the company behind dbt) notes, before Redshift launched in 2012, performing relatively straightforward analyses could be incredibly time-consuming even with medium-sized data sets. An entire data tooling ecosystem has since been created to mitigate these two problems.

The emergence of the modern data stack (example logos and categories). Image Credits: Validio

Scaling relational databases and data warehouse appliances used to be a real challenge. Only 10 years ago, a company that wanted to understand customer behavior had to buy and rack servers before its engineers and data scientists could work on generating insights. Data and its surrounding infrastructure was expensive, so only the biggest companies could afford large-scale data ingestion and storage.

Then came a (Red)shift. In October 2012, AWS presented the first viable solution to the scale challenge with Redshift — a cloud-native, massively parallel processing (MPP) database that anyone could use for a monthly price of a pair of sneakers ($100) — about 1,000x cheaper than the previous “local-server” setup. With a price drop of this magnitude, the floodgates opened and every company, big or small, could now store and process massive amounts of data and unlock new opportunities.

As Jamin Ball from Altimeter Capital summarizes, Redshift was a big deal because it was the first cloud-native OLAP warehouse and reduced the cost of owning an OLAP database by orders of magnitude. The speed of processing analytical queries also increased dramatically. And later on (Snowflake pioneered this), they separated computing and storage, which, in overly simplified terms, meant customers could scale their storage and computing resources independently.

What did this all mean? An explosion of data collection and storage.

News: Eano’s Stella Wu is not your typical construction tech startup founder

• May 20, 2021
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Renovating a home is an exciting, yet often fraught-filled, endeavor. One startup that aims to help make the process simpler, cheaper and less stressful by helping people manage the home renovation process has raised $6 million to help it grow even faster. Builders VC led the round, which included participation from Celtic, Newfund and Wish co-founder Danny

Renovating a home is an exciting, yet often fraught-filled, endeavor.

One startup that aims to help make the process simpler, cheaper and less stressful by helping people manage the home renovation process has raised $6 million to help it grow even faster. Builders VC led the round, which included participation from Celtic, Newfund and Wish co-founder Danny Zhang, who also sits on Eano’s board.

Stella Wu, who formerly worked as a growth product manager at Wish, got firsthand experience of the pain points related to the process when she bought her own house in 2017.

“I realized there were a lot of fragmented issues in the renovation space, especially when it came to the individual workers,” she recalls. “They were not reliable and bad at communication.”

So in 2019 she founded Eano, a San Francisco-based startup that aims to walk a homeowner through a renovation and help connect individual contractors with new clients. Eano also works on projects like building ADUs (accessory dwelling units).

As more people spent time at home last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the startup saw its contract revenue spike by 5x, Wu says. And in the first quarter of this year, business was up 70% year over year.

Image Credits: Eano CEO and founder Stella Wu / Eano

Eano, she said, offers competitive and transparent pricing so that homeowners aren’t surprised as a remodeling project goes on. Its automated process tracks all communications and progress in one place and the company has grown what it describes as a “network of experienced, local professionals” that are fully licensed, vetted and insured that it pairs homeowners with on projects.

“There’s all these individual contractors out there and even though they are very affordable, it’s very hard for them to get to the homeowners, as they don’t have much resources,” Wu, a Chinese immigrant, told TechCrunch. “So they come to us and we basically take care of it all.” For now, Eano is operating in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, with plans to expand to Seattle and Houston this year.

The company plans to take its new capital and “go deep into the product side.”

Once they become a client, homeowners can use Eano to select a certain remodeling package, and then they can check the project progress, communicate with the team and even see the progress through videos.

“We’re also helping contractors make communicating and receiving payment much easier,” Wu said. “We’re also helping these individual contractors increase the brand, and helping them with the administration and customer support side with our software.”

Jim Kim of Builders VC, said he first encountered Wu and Jung while they were at Wish.

“We invest in people, and when you can find extremely talented entrepreneurs who have built successful companies and still have the hunger to win, you jump in with a blank check,” he said. “We love Eano’s mission — combining a similar product sourcing strategy as Wish with technology to bring a better experience to all constituents in the antiquated construction industry.”

Kim is also impressed by the fact that Wu is driven to prove “that you don’t need to be a 55-year-old man wearing steel-toed boots to have a meaningful impact on construction.”

“We love that ethos — it matches with our thinking about backing entrepreneurs who don’t fit into the stereotypical box,” Kim said.

News: Electric hypercar phenom and founder Mate Rimac is heading to TC Sessions: Mobility 2021

• May 20, 2021
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A decade ago, Rimac Automobili was one-person startup in a garage. Today, the EV and technology company founded by Mate Rimac employs more than 1,000 people, has partnerships with Porsche and Hyundai Motor Group and is on track to launch its 1,914 hp, all-electric C_Two hypercar this year. If that weren’t enough, Rimac also launched

A decade ago, Rimac Automobili was one-person startup in a garage. Today, the EV and technology company founded by Mate Rimac employs more than 1,000 people, has partnerships with Porsche and Hyundai Motor Group and is on track to launch its 1,914 hp, all-electric C_Two hypercar this year.

If that weren’t enough, Rimac also launched a subsidiary company Greyp Bikes to produce electrically assisted bicycles. It’s a notable run for a company that Mate Rimac founded after converting a 1984 BMW into an electric vehicle that at one time was the fastest in the world. What makes it remarkable is he started the company in Croatia and at time that lacked the typical network found in Silicon Valley.

“Ten years ago today, I was still like one guy in a garage and we did this in a location in Croatia where there is not a lot of technology or industry in general,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch earlier this year. “So it was crazy, I didn’t have a single venture capital fund. There were no tech startups. There was no industry in general, not just like automotive, but industry as such. So, there was no talent, there were no buildings we could use. So, we had a very tough upcoming, and was very hard for us to start we were just surviving and, you know from month to month and trying to pay the bills and most of the times we were struggling with that so the first six or seven years of our life most of the time for me was focusing on keeping the company going and how the hell I’m going to pay the next payroll or the next rent and stuff like that.”

Rimac overcame those challenges, gaining Porsche and Hyundai as investors and importantly, generating revenue from the beginning — and even profits.

And Mate Rimac isn’t done.

The founder and CEO recently unveiled a design for new headquarters in Croatia that will include an on-site test track, an R&D and production facility, museum, gym and day care for employees and even an-site organic food production and farm animals. The complex, which is expected to be completed by 2023, will allow the company to ramp up from prototype and smaller projects to high-volume production of its high-performance electric drivetrain and battery systems for customers that include Porsche, Hyundai-Kia, SEAT, Renault and Pininfarina.

We’re excited to announce that Mate Rimac will be joining us at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021, a one-day virtual event that is scheduled June 9. We have a lot of ground to cover with Mate Rimac from how he started a company outside of a traditional incubator or VC network, his upcoming electric hypercar and plans for the company’s future.

In case, you’re not familiar, each year we bring together engineers and founders, investors and CEOs who are working on all the present and future ways people and packages will get from Point A to Point B. The agenda is packed with leaders in electric vehicles — that would be Mate Rimac — autonomous vehicle technology, micromobility and even urban and regional air taxis.

Among the growing list of speakers are Motional President Karl Iagnemma and Aurora co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson, who will team up to talk about technical problems that remain to be solved, the war over talent, the best business models and applications of autonomous vehicles and maybe even hear a few stories from the early days of testing and launching a startup.

Other guests include GM‘s VP of Global Innovation Pam Fletcher, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, Joby Aviation founder and CEO JoeBen Bevirt, investor and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (whose special purpose acquisition company just merged with Joby), investors Clara Brenner of Urban Innovation Fund, Quin Garcia of Autotech Ventures and Rachel Holt of Construct Capital, Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson, community organizer, transportation consultant and lawyer Tamika L. Butler, Remix co-founder and CEO Tiffany Chu and Revel co-founder and CEO Frank Reig.

We also recently announced a panel dedicated to China’s robotaxi industry. We’re bringing together three female leaders from Chinese autonomous vehicle startups that have an overseas footprint: Jewel Li from AutoX, which is backed by Chinese state-owned automakers Dongfeng Motor and SAIC Motor; Huan Sun from Momenta, which attracted Bosch, Daimler and Toyota in its $500 million round closed in March; and Jennifer Li from WeRide, whose valuation jumped to $3 billion after a financing round in May.

Don’t wait to book your tickets to TC Sessions: Mobility as prices go up at the door. Grab your passes right now and hear from today’s biggest mobility leaders.

News: Geospatial startup Unfolded.ai acquired by Foursquare

• May 20, 2021
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Well, that was fast. Just a few months after raising its seed round, Unfolded.ai announced today that it is being acquired by Foursquare. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The startup had raised a total of about $6 million when we last checked in with them. The company, founded by a group of ex-Uber

Well, that was fast.

Just a few months after raising its seed round, Unfolded.ai announced today that it is being acquired by Foursquare. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The startup had raised a total of about $6 million when we last checked in with them.

The company, founded by a group of ex-Uber geospatial engineers, was building on top of popular open-source libraries that its founders had created including Kepler.gl, a web application that can take geospatial datasets and visualize them, and Deck.gl, which offers an extensible application framework for processing geospatial datasets and preparing them for visualization.

As I wrote earlier this year:

The startup’s main product is called Unfolded Studio, which acts as a backend-as-a-service for applications built on top of Kepler.gl (which is only a frontend library itself) handling components like data management and server communications. In particular, the product is designed to bring different geospatial datasets together and allow them all to interact with each other in one unified view.

The acquisition by Foursquare is designed to bring Unfolded’s geospatial technology into Foursquare Everywhere, the company’s new brand and product focus on delivering scalable location services to all sorts of customers.

Foursquare has evolved significantly in recent years to become a location-focused advertising and marketing platform. It announced that it was merging with Factual back in April 2020, and switched out CEO David Shim with Gary Little in November, who assumed the titles of CEO and president. This acquisition appears to be the first for Little since he took the helm.

Foursquare CEO and president Gary Little. Image Credits: Foursquare

In its press statement, the company said that “this acquisition propels Foursquare’s evolution into the singular source companies turn to for high quality, easy-to-use location data and the technology they need to make sense of it.”

News: Don’t tweet about $ASS

• May 20, 2021
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I am not a smart man. Earlier today I tweeted about $ASS, a cryptocurrency named after a dog. In this case, Australian Shepherds. And after doing that obviously stupid thing, my Twitter feed became chock-full of ass-related imagery, memes, and $ASS coin stans breathing on me. It’s all very annoying as I run Tweetdeck on

I am not a smart man.

Earlier today I tweeted about $ASS, a cryptocurrency named after a dog. In this case, Australian Shepherds. And after doing that obviously stupid thing, my Twitter feed became chock-full of ass-related imagery, memes, and $ASS coin stans breathing on me.

It’s all very annoying as I run Tweetdeck on a work laptop which is now very, well, dicey a proposition given what I’m being sent.

$ASS is short for Australian Safe Shepherd, by the by. It’s a cryptocurrency that, much like Dogecoin, is a joke.

A joke that its own website doesn’t take too seriously. For example, if you navigate to AssFinance, you will find a very detailed look at $ASS’s technical underpinnings, and plans for the future:

I found this hilarious. So I tweeted about it. And then everyone in the $ASS world began to assault my Twitter. Pro-tip: This is not a good way to get taken seriously. But as $ASS is not trying to be taken seriously, does that even matter?

The coin is effectively a limid pump, a cryptocurrency designed to get early adopters to spread the word about it, and then hold. It built its economics around just those goals:

But enough of all that. Why do we give a shit about $ASS? A few reasons:

• This sort of financial stupidity is funny, but some regular folks are going to get burned.
• The $ASS pump is indicative of the level of speculation present in the cryptocurrency world today, which is likely to the credibility detriment of more serious projects. And helps explain how bitcoin has managed the price appreciation it has in recent quarters.
• $ASS coin is up 1794.3% in the last 14 days, per CoinGecko. This is likely key to its current charm; people love free money and past gains make for an attractive lie to oneself concerning future returns.

As a concept, $ASS fits neatly into my budding view that as current generations of people in their 20s and 30s are desperate for a firmer foothold on a middle-class life than today’s wage-weak, healthcare-deficient, and labor-unfriendly economy is willing to provide, moon-shots on speculative bullshit have outsized appeal compared to other times in American history when it was easier to afford a house.

And while it’s hard to be serious about a butt dog-themed bit of Internet money, $ASS is, well, very 2021. And who are we to pretend to be better than covering a shitcoin? Even if only to mock it.

Bloomberg has more on $ASS if you want a more serious take about an unserious project.

News: Slicing up pizza robots

• May 20, 2021
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So, true story. Over the weekend I was talking to someone about restaurant robotics. It’s a concept people often have trouble visualizing — and understandably so. Among other things, there’s really no commonly accepted form factor in a category that sometimes is literally a robot arm flipping hamburgers. My short response was, “they’re large kiosks

So, true story. Over the weekend I was talking to someone about restaurant robotics. It’s a concept people often have trouble visualizing — and understandably so. Among other things, there’s really no commonly accepted form factor in a category that sometimes is literally a robot arm flipping hamburgers.

My short response was, “they’re large kiosks that make pizza.” And honestly, that’s not really far from the truth. These sorts of self-contained assembly line robots are probably about as close as we have to a consensus design in the category — and for good reason. They’re designed to operate with minimal interaction — largely the employee’s involvement is limited to order input, restocking ingredients and cleaning.

The pizza part is two-fold. First: people like pizza. It’s plentiful and popular, so it makes sense that it would be one of the first foodstuffs you’d want to automate. Second: it’s relatively easy to automate. The process for making it is consistent and the constraints are clear. It’s something that can be broken down into an easy to follow, step by step set of instructions.

I covered two restaurant robots in the past week. It’s a category that saw a pretty sizable boost in interest during the pandemic, as restaurants were short-staffed essential services looking for ways to minimize human contact with food as the scientific world was scrambling to determine how the novel coronavirus is spread.

Picnic very much fits in with the aforementioned description. It is, quite literally, a big, pizza-making box. This week the Seattle-based company announced a $16.3 million raise that includes a $3 million bridge filed last fall. It’s targeting restaurants, as well as public gathering spaces (remember those?) like schools, stadiums and hospitals. There are a handful of companies in the category, including XRobotics — though the formerly best known, Zume, bailed out of the pizza robot space a while back.

Chef Robotics announced a $7.7 million raise this week. I can’t really tell you what the final robot looks like yet, because that’s still trade secret stuff. Here’s what the company says:

Chef is designed to mimic the flexibility of humans, allowing customers to handle thousands of different kinds of food using minimal hardware changes. Chef does this using artificial intelligence that can learn how to handle more and more ingredients over time and that also improves. This allows customers to do things like change their menu often. Additionally, Chef’s modular architecture allows customers to quickly scale up just as they would by hiring more staff (but unlike humans, Chef always shows up on time and doesn’t need breaks).

Not a lot to go off there, but the modularity bit is interesting — and something a lot of these companies are exploring. If you can get a robot to automate a simple, repetitive task, you can potentially offer swappable hardware that can apply the technology to different kinds of food.

Other notable raises for the week include Mech-Mind robots. The Beijing-based company announced a Series C. It hasn’t revealed a specific figure, but given that it says the raise brings its total funding to over $100 million and it had previously raised a total of $79 million (including a $15 million Series B last year), you can extrapolate from there.

Mech-Mind is an industrial robotics and AI company focused on various manufacturing tasks.