Monthly Archives: July 2021

News: Square launches business bank accounts

• July 20, 2021
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One step at a time, Square is creating a new bank from scratch. Today, the company is launching a new product called Square Banking that combines a checking account, savings accounts, debit cards and loans under a single roof. With Square Banking, the company wants to convince small businesses that it’s just easier to manage

One step at a time, Square is creating a new bank from scratch. Today, the company is launching a new product called Square Banking that combines a checking account, savings accounts, debit cards and loans under a single roof. With Square Banking, the company wants to convince small businesses that it’s just easier to manage all their money needs through Square.

Originally focused on payments processing, Square launched a debit card for its business customers in 2019. This way, business owners can start spending the money they’re bringing in through Square payments without having to transfer the money to a separate bank account first.

With today’s launch, the company is expanding beyond its debit card offering by adding checking and savings accounts. Every time you make a sale, you can access the funds from your new Square checking account. There are no monthly fees, no credit checks and no minimum balance.

And because it’s a traditional checking account, you get your own account and routing numbers — you can receive and send money from your account directly. Behind the scenes, checking accounts are currently provided by Sutton Bank — your funds are FDIC-insured.

Square now also lets you open savings accounts. The company is taking advantage of the fact that it also manages your sales through its payments products. You can choose a percentage of your Square sales revenue so that you can save money every day without having to think about it. Users can also create different folders for different business needs — sales taxes, new machine, etc.

Right now, Square offers an annuel percentage yield (APY) of 0.50% but that rate is only guaranteed through the end of 2021. Transfers between your savings accounts and your Square checking account are free and instant. Once again, your savings accounts are FDIC-insured.

Image Credits: Square

Finally, Square is integrating its business loans with the rest of its banking products. Instead of calling it Square Capital, the product is simply called ‘Loans’. The company recently completed the charter approval process for Square Financial Services, proving that its lending products are a key part of the company’s strategy going forward.

Compared to traditional business loans, Square has simplified repayments. It takes a percentage of your daily card transactions, which means that you pay more when you have more sales and you pay less when you have fewer sales. Of couse, if you’re temporarily shutting down your business, you have to pay a minimum payment every 60 days.

Square Banking will be particularly interesting for small businesses already using Square to process payments for in-person and online sales. Chances are these customers also have a business bank account that isn’t managed by Square. But they could realize that they use those separate accounts less and less as Square keeps adding features to its banking products.

News: Little Spoon scoops up $44M to grow its children’s nutrition delivery service

• July 20, 2021
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The quest to disrupt the traditional baby food aisle continues as more of today’s parents seek out nutritional food for their children.

The quest to disrupt the traditional baby food aisle continues as more of today’s parents seek out nutritional food for their children.

One of the startups taking on the $100 billion children’s health and wellness market is Little Spoon, producing fresh, direct-to-consumer baby and children’s meals.

The New York-based company announced on Tuesday a $44 million round of Series B funding led by Valor Equity Partners, with participation from Kairos HQ. The new financing gives Little Spoon $73 million in total funding since it was founded in 2017 by Lisa Barnett, Ben Lewis, Michelle Muller and Angela Vranich.

The subscription-based service delivers meals from its Babyblends line of organic purees, and Plates, a healthy toddler and kid’s meals line. Babyblends costs less than $3 per meal, while Plates is less than $5 per meal. It also provides vitamins and natural remedies under its Booster line.

Barnett, president and chief marketing officer, told TechCrunch that the new funding round enables the company to evolve as a children’s nutrition solution and provide more engagement with parents through its “Is This Normal” community platform.

The baby and kid’s market is “very sleepy” traditionally, as is the parenting space as a whole, she said. Legacy companies aren’t staying on top of the needs of today’s parents, and consumers are not tolerating subpar products and experiences.

The four founders of Little Spoon came together to respond to those needs, Barnett said, and that is why more brands are also emerging. Another startup in the premium baby food space is Serenity Kids, offering low-sugar baby food. In June, it raised $7 million in Series A funding led by CircleUp Growth Partners.

“It’s not an accident that when we started, seven in 10 new parents using our products were of the millennial generation,” Barrett added. “Millennials entered this stage, en masse, more aware of the connection to food, health and nutrition. They don’t want old baby food sitting on the shelf, and they are dual-income households where it isn’t convenient to cook it yourself.”

Little Spoon products. Image Credits: Little Spoon

Little Spoon is differentiating itself from the competition by creating an entire experience around the consumer with its community platform and by providing a range of products for every stage that are high quality and accessible in price.

The Series B comes as the company is doubling down on what is working as it builds out its platform, CEO Lewis said. Aiming to be a holistic solution for parents, he intends to use the new funding to build the community and content platform — what he considers the company’s “secret sauce,” and bulk up operations to support the growth.

The company is on track for more than 300% in revenue growth. This year, it quadrupled its team from 10 to 37 team members. Since its launch, Little Spoon delivered more than 15 million meals.

“We are still in the early innings of what Little Spoon could be,” Lewis said. “We are laser-focused on developing new products, investing in the community, building out more capacity and bolstering operations.”

Alex Fiance, co-founder and co-CEO of Kairos, told TechCrunch that his firm invests in companies whose business model starts with the problem. He sees Little Spoon at the intersection of food tech and healthcare amid the concept of food as medicine.

He’s known the founders for over a decade and liked that the company’s product vision “could run for decades.” He also backs the brand’s mission for following children as they age and becoming a trusted source for keeping children healthy.

In fact, he is also among Little Spoon’s target customers. France’s daughter was born in November 2019 and grew up eating Little Spoon. When it was time to switch her to solid foods, Fiance said he was happy when the company introduced its Plates line.

“Little Spoon makes my wife’s and my life easier,” he added. “I was sad to see that she might have aged out of Little Spoon if they hadn’t launched Plates. We couldn’t be any more believers.”

News: Numerade lands $100M valuation for short-form STEM videos

• July 20, 2021
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Edtech entrepreneurs are using their moment in the sun to rethink the structures and impact of nearly every aspect of modern-day learning, from the art of testing to the reality of information retention. Yet, the most popular product up for grabs may just be a seemingly simple one: the almighty tutoring session. and Numerade, an

Edtech entrepreneurs are using their moment in the sun to rethink the structures and impact of nearly every aspect of modern-day learning, from the art of testing to the reality of information retention. Yet, the most popular product up for grabs may just be a seemingly simple one: the almighty tutoring session. and Numerade, an edtech founded in 2018, just had its take on scalable, high-quality tutoring sessions valued at $100 million.

Numerade sells subscriptions to short-form videos that explain how certain equations and experiments work, and then uses an algorithm to make those explainers better suited to a learner’s comprehension style. Per CEO and co-founder Nhon Ma, the startup’s focus on asynchronous, contextualized content will make it easier to scale high-quality tutoring at an affordable price.

“Real teaching involves sight and sound, but also the context of how something is delivered in the vernacular of how a student actually learns,” Ma said. And he wants Numerade to be a platform that goes beyond the robotic Q&A and step-by-step answer platforms such as Wolfram Alpha, and actually integrates science into how solutions are communicated to users.

Today, the company announced that it has raised $26 million at a $100 million valuation in a round including investors such as IDG Capital, General Catalyst, Mucker Capital, Kapor Capital, Interplay Ventures, and strategic investors such as Margo Georgiadis, the former CEO of Ancestry, Khaled Helioui, the former CEO of Bigpoint Games and angel investor in Uber, and Taavet Hinrikus, founder of Wise.

“There are supply and demand mechanics inherent to synchronous tutoring,” Ma said. He explained how the best tutors have limited time, may demand premiums, and overall lead to a constraint on the supply side of marketplaces. Group tutoring has been an option employed by some companies, pairing multiple students to one tutor for efficiency saake, but he thinks that it is “really outdated, and actually decreases the quality of tutoring.”

With Numerade avoiding both live learning and Wolfram-Alpha style explainers that just give the answer to students, the company has turned to a third option: videos. Videos are not new to edtech, but currently majorly reside in massive open online course providers such as Coursera or Udemy, or ‘edutainment’ platforms like MasterClass and Outschool. Numerade thinks that teacher-led or educator-guided videos can be built around a specific problem within Chapter 2 of Fundamentals of Physics.

Student learning from Numerade videos.

The company has three main products: bootcamp videos for foundational knowledge, step-by-step videos that turn that knowledge into a skill and focus on sequence, and finally, quizzes that assess how much of the aforementioned information was retained.

The true moonshot in the startup, though, is the algorithm that decides which students see which videos. When explaining how the algorithm works, Ma used words like “deep learning” and “computer vision” and “ontology” but mostly the algorithm boils down to this: it wants to bring TikTok-level specificity to educational videos, using users’ historical actions to better push certain content that fits their learning style.

For example, the startup believes that offering step-by-step videos help the brain understand patterns, diversity of problems, and eventually better understand solutions. The algorithm mostly shows up in Numerade quizzes, which will see how a student performs on a topic and then input those results back into the model to assumedly better cater a new series of bootcamps and questions.

“To help a student grow and learn, our model first understands their strengths and weaknesses and then surfaces relevant conceptual, practical, and assessment content to build their subject knowledge. The algorithm can parse structured data from videos and provide different teaching styles to suit the needs of all students,” he said.

As of now, Numerade’s algorithm appears preliminary. Users need to be paid subscribers and have a sufficient usage history in order to start benefiting from more targeted content. Even so, it’s unclear how the algorithm leads to different pedagogical content to students beyond resurfacing concepts that a student erred on in a previous quiz.

Numerade’s moonshot is built on an equally ambitious premise: that students want to learn concepts, not just Google for the fastest answer so they can finish procrastinated homework. Ma explained how engagement time on Numerade videos can be somewhere from double to triple the video’s entire length, which means that students are interacting with the content beyond just skipping over to the answer

Numerade isn’t alone in trying to take on Wolfram Alpha. Over the past year, edtech unicorns like Quizlet and Course Hero have invested heavily in AI-powered chatbots and live calculators, the latter largely through acquisitions of companies such as Numerade. These platforms are rallying around the idea that tech-powered tutoring sessions should prioritize speed and simplicity, instead of relationship-building and time. In other words, maybe students won’t go to a tutor once a week for math, but they will go to a platform that can methodically explain an answer at midnight, hours before their precalculus exam.

Despite its somewhat early-stage algorithm innovation and heavy-weigh competition, Numerade’s fresh venture backing and ability to bring in revenue is promising. While declining to divulge specifics, Ma said that the company is “quickly tracking” to eight figures in ARR, meaning it’s making at least $10 million in annual revenue from its current subscriber base. He sees perspective as Numerade’s biggest competitive advantage.

“A common criticism of commercial STEM education is that it’s too modular – textbooks teach physics as stand-alone,” Ma said. “Our algorithm does not, instead it treats STEM as an interlocking ecosystem; concepts in math, physics, chemistry, and biology are omnidirectionally related.”

News: Powered by local stores, JOKR joins the 15 min grocery race with a $170M Series A

• July 20, 2021
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“We are true believers in the fact that the world needs a new Amazon, a better one, a more sustainable one, one that appreciates local areas and products.” It’s quite one thing to claim you are out to replace Amazon (just as its founder goes into space), but Ralf Wenzel, Founder and CEO of JOKR,

“We are true believers in the fact that the world needs a new Amazon, a better one, a more sustainable one, one that appreciates local areas and products.” It’s quite one thing to claim you are out to replace Amazon (just as its founder goes into space), but Ralf Wenzel, Founder and CEO of JOKR, certainly believes his company might have a shot. And he’s raising plenty of money to aim at that goal.

Today the fast-growing grocery and retail delivery platform has closed a whopping $170 million Series A funding round. The round comes three months after the company started operations in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe. JOKR’s team consists of people who created both foodpanda and Delivery Hero, so from the outside at least, they have the chops to build a big business.

The round was led by Led by GGV Capital, Balderton Capital, and Tiger Global Management. It was joined by Activant Capital, Greycroft, Fabrice Grinda’s FJ Labs, as well as Latin America’s tech-specialized VC firms Kaszek and Monashees, as did HV Capital, the first institutional investor.

Based out of New York, where it launched last month JOKR plans to roll out across cities in the U.S., Latin America and Europe. Right now it’s live in nine cities, across Latin American countries, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, as well as Poland and Austria in Europe.

Wenzel said: “The investment we announced today will empower us to continue our expansion at an unprecedented rate as we continue to build JOKR into the premier platform for a new generation of online shopping, with instant delivery, a focus on local product offerings and more sustainable delivery and supply chains. We are proud to be able to partner with such a distinguished group of international tech investors to help us seize the enormous opportunity in front of us.”

JOKR’s pitch is that it enables small local businesses to sell their goods, sourced from other local businesses, via the platform, thus expanding their reach without the need for complex logistics and delivery networks on their own. But that local aspect also builds sustainability into the model.

Hans Tung, Managing Partner at GGV Capital, and newly appointed member of JOKR’s board said: “Ralf has put together an all-star team for food delivery that will transform the retail supply chain. The combination of food delivery experience and the sophisticated data capabilities that optimizes inventory allocation and dispatch, set JOKR apart. We look forward to working with the team on their mission to make retail more instant, more democratic, and more sustainable.”

JOKR is joining other fast-delivery grocery providers like Gorillas and Getir in providing a 15 minute delivery time for supermarket and convenience products, pharmaceuticals, but also ‘exclusive’ local products that are not available in regular supermarkets. Although, so far, it only has an app on Google Play.

Speaking at an interview with me Wenzel said: “We are close to the equivalent of Instacart, strongly grocery focused. Our offering is significantly broader than the ones of Gorillas because we’re not only focusing on convenience and all kinds of different grocery categories, we’re getting closer to a supermarket offering, so the biggest competing element would be the traditional supermarkets, the offline supermarkets, as well as online grocery propositions. We are vertically integrating and hence procuring directly, cutting out middlemen and building our own distribution warehouses.”

News: Blue Origin’s New Shepard carries Jeff Bezos and three crew members to space and back

• July 20, 2021
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Blue Origin successfully completed its first crewed launch Tuesday, sending four human passengers to space – including the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos. The result of billions of dollars of investment, dozens of test launches and some petty squabbling amongst ultra-rich founders, the triumph of the New Shepard, along with that of Virgin Galactic earlier this

Blue Origin successfully completed its first crewed launch Tuesday, sending four human passengers to space – including the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos. The result of billions of dollars of investment, dozens of test launches and some petty squabbling amongst ultra-rich founders, the triumph of the New Shepard, along with that of Virgin Galactic earlier this month, undoubtably heralds the dawn of a new age of space tourism.

It was quite the media spectacle. The mission took place at Launch Site One, Blue Origin’s sprawling and secretive facility that sits around thirty miles north of the small town of Van Horn, Texas. Every hotel in Van Horn and nearby towns were sold out of rooms in the days leading to launch as spectators traveled in for the event; meanwhile, a huge gaggle of local, national and online outlets (including yours truly) swarmed the Press Site as early as 2:30 AM CST. Despite some premature calls for rain in the early hours of the morning, the skies stayed clear and things mostly kept to schedule.

The four-person crew – including Bezos, his brother, Mark, 18-year old student Oliver Daemen, and aviation pioneer and Mercury 13 veteran Wally Funk – emerged from the training center and caught a Rivian R1S electric SUV to the launch pad around 45 minutes prior to launch. (Bezos drove a Rivian R1T pickup to the landing site of the rocket after its last test, a nod to Amazon’s sizeable investment in the EV startup). The crew climbed the launch tower and took a brief respite in an adjacent shelter, before climbing into the capsule, dubbed RSS First Step.

There was a brief hold at T-15 minutes, leading to the launch running slightly behind schedule. New Shepard took off at 8:11 CST. They passed the Kármán line (more on that later) at 8:15 AM; capsule separation followed, and the booster returned to the launch site autonomously and with a loud boom at 8:19 AM. The crewed capsule floated slowly to Earth via parachute, touching land at 8:22 AM for an eleven-minutes total flight time.

Image Credits: Blue Origin (opens in a new window)

The flight was the result of fifteen tests of the reusable suborbital New Shepard rocket, including a rehearsal launch in April that included a dry run of flight preparations and a mock crew embarked (then disembarked before take-off) into the capsule. Blue Origin now joins rival Virgin Galactic in a very, very small group of commercial space companies to send private citizens to orbit.

Daemon was added to the crew after the anonymous auction winner, who bid $28 million for the seat, had to bow out due to a scheduling conflict. CNBC reported that Daemen’s father, CEO of the Dutch private equity firm Somerset Capital Partners, placed the second-highest bid. Daemen is the youngest person ever to go to space at 18, and Funk is the oldest ever at 82.

The route to space

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, six years after he started ecommerce behemoth Amazon. The company has zeroed in on space tourism, and it sees this flight as the requisite proof of concept it needs to start flying customers. To that end, the New Shepard capsule has large, tourism-friendly windows – the largest in spaceflight history, according to the company. “These windows make up a third of the capsule, immersing you in the vastness of space and life-changing views of our blue planet,” it says on the Blue Origin website.

The launch is also the culmination of weeks of squabbling between Bezos and his billionaire spacefaring rival, Richard Branson, who was aboard his own flight to space 10 days earlier. But despite ostensibly beating Bezos to the punch, much of the fighting was over what actually counts as space – and whether VSS Unity, Virgin Galactic’s rocket-powered spaceplane, actually went there.

Image Credits: Blue Origin

The kerfuffle is over what’s known as the Kármán line, an internationally recognized imaginary boundary of space that’s around 60 miles above Earth. VSS Unity flew to around 51.4 miles – above the boundary recognized by NASA. “From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name,” Blue Origin tweeted two days before the Virgin launch. The tweet also included a little infographic throwing further shade at on Virgin flights.

From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name. For 96% of the world’s population, space begins 100 km up at the internationally recognized Kármán line. pic.twitter.com/QRoufBIrUJ

— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) July 9, 2021

This is just the beginning for Blue Origin. Director of astronaut sales Ariane Cornell said at a pre-mission briefing on July 18 that she’s been “chatting with many of [Blue Origin’s] future customers who have signed for the subsequent flights.” She added that the company intends on launching two more flights this year, with CEO Bob Smith estimating that a second crewed New Shepard flight could take place in September or October.

What does this mean for the rest of us (as in, those that don’t have a couple extra million floating around in our bank accounts)? While the so-called billionaire space race is a petty squabble, both Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic’s respective launches are the likely heralds of a new age of space travel for consumers and scientists alike. It will be limited to the wealthy at first, but as TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm argues, costs will go down and more humans will go to space – including scientists and researchers, maybe even me or you.

In case you missed it, you can catch the entire launch on Blue Origin’s archived livestream here:

News: Pillar VC closes $192M for two funds targeting SaaS, crypto, biotech, manufacturing

• July 20, 2021
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As its name suggests, venture firm Pillar VC is focused on building “pillar” companies in Boston and across the Northeast.

As its name suggests, venture firm Pillar VC is focused on building “pillar” companies in Boston and across the Northeast.

The Boston-based seed-stage firm closed a raise of $192 million of capital that was split into two funds, $169 million for Pillar III and $23 million for Pillar Select. More than 25 investors are backing the new fund, including portfolio founders.

Jamie Goldstein, Sarah Hodges and Russ Wilcox are Pillar VC’s three partners, and all three lead investments for Pillar. The trio all have backgrounds as entrepreneurs: Goldstein, who has spent the past two decades in VC, co-founded speech recognition company PureSpeech, which was acquired by Voice Control Systems; Hodges was at online learning company Pluralsight; and Wilcox was CEO of electronic paper company E Ink, which he sold in 2009.

Pillar typically invests in a range of enterprise and consumer startups and aims to target Pillar III at startups focused on biology, enterprise SaaS, AI/ML, crypto, fintech, hardware, manufacturing and logistics. The firm will make pre-seed investments of $50,000 to $500,000 and seed-round investments of $2 million to $6 million.

One of the unique aspects of the firm is that it will buy common stock so that it will be aligned with founders and take on the same risks, Goldstein told TechCrunch.

The firm, founded in 2016, already has 50 portfolio companies from its first two funds — Pillar I, which raised $57 million, and Pillar $100 million. These include cryptocurrency company Circle, which announced a SPAC earlier this month, 3D printing company Desktop Metal that went public, also via SPAC, last year, and PillPack, which was bought by Amazon in 2018.

“Pillar is an experiment, answering the question of ‘what would happen if unicorn CEOs came in and helped bootstrap the next generation’,” Wilcox said. “The experience is working, and Pillar does what VCs ought to do, which is back first-of-its-kind ideas.”

In addition to leading investments, Hodges leads the Pillar VC platform for the firm’s portfolio companies. Many of the portfolio companies are spinouts from universities, and need help turning that technology into a company. Pillar provides guidance to recruit a CEO or partner on the business side, leadership development, recruit talent and makes introductions to potential customers.

Pillar also intends to invest a third of the new fund into that biology category, specifically looking at the convergence of life science and technology, Wilcox said.

In its second fund, the firm started Petri, a pre-seed bio accelerator focused on biotech, and brought in founders using computation and engineering to develop technologies around the areas of agriculture, genetics, cell and gene therapies, medical data and drug discovery. The third fund will continue to support the accelerator through both pre-seed and seed investments.

The first investments from Pillar III are being finalized, but Hodges expects to infuse capital into another 50 companies.

“We are super bullish on Boston,” she added. “So many companies here are growing to be household names, and an exciting energy is coming out.”

News: Metal 3D printing company Fabric8Labs raises $19M

• July 20, 2021
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Fabric8Labs this morning announced that it has raised $19.3 million. The Series A was led by Intel Capital and features Lam Capital, TDK Ventures, SE Ventures, imec.xpand, Stanley Ventures and Mark Cuban. It follows $4 million in seed funding raised in mid-2018. The San Diego-based startup specializes in metal 3D printing. It’s a hot category,

Fabric8Labs this morning announced that it has raised $19.3 million. The Series A was led by Intel Capital and features Lam Capital, TDK Ventures, SE Ventures, imec.xpand, Stanley Ventures and Mark Cuban. It follows $4 million in seed funding raised in mid-2018.

The San Diego-based startup specializes in metal 3D printing. It’s a hot category, of late, as evidenced by Desktop Metal and Markforged’s decisions to go public via SPAC over the past two years. Fabric8Labs says lower cost and less energy consumption are among the benefits to its process.

“Our process is inherently different and does not utilize powder nor thermal processes. Instead, it is based on electrochemical deposition, which operates at room temperature, has a significantly lower power demand, and utilizes an aqueous (water-based) solution made from low-cost metal salts,” CEO Jeff Herman tells TechCrunch. “In combination, the commodity priced raw materials and power-efficient process enable a step change in reducing the total cost of ownership and cost per-part.”

The company says the funding will go toward doubling its headcount before the end of the year, increase development of its existing technology and showcase its ability to print high-resolution copper pieces. The company plans to bring the technology to market, but notes that goals of hitting a general market will be a multiyear process.

Scalability is always one of the biggest question marks around any kind of additive manufacturing. Herman says 3D printing for manufacturing is firmly in Fabric8Labs’ sights.

“Our technology is extremely scalable,” the executive says. “The vision we share with our partners is to deploy our technology at a massive scale in the factories of the future, with process capabilities and economics uniquely positioned to tackle high-volume manufacturing. A Fabric8Labs-enabled factory could easily consist of 50+ automated systems sharing large feedstock reservoirs, similar to other large-scale electrochemical processes in operation today.”

News: Commercial real estate lending startup Lev brings in $30M on a $130M valuation

• July 20, 2021
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Commercial real estate has been slow to embrace technology, with most deals still paper-heavy and complicated.

Commercial real estate has been slow to embrace technology; though it has an addressable financing market of more than $40 billion, putting together a deal is still mostly manual, paper-heavy and complicated.

New York-based Lev is taking on this problem by automating workflows online and gathering hundreds of millions of data points into machine learning software to ensure financing accuracy. To do this, the commercial real estate financing transaction platform raised $30 million to give it a $130 million valuation just two years into its inception.

The latest financing comes four months after the company raised $10 million in seed funding led by NFX. Greenspring led the latest round, with participation from First American Title. Existing investors NFX, Canaan Partners, JLL Spark, Animo Ventures and Ludlow Ventures also joined in to give Lev total investments of more than $34 million, according to Crunchbase data.

Lev founder and CEO Yaakov Zar previously co-founded Boston-based Dispatch, which built tools for home services businesses. It was when he and his wife went through the homebuying process — and their mortgage fell through — that Zar decided to look at real estate financing.

He channeled his frustration into becoming a licensed mortgage loan originator. After relocating to New York, Zar was helping a friend at a nonprofit organization refinance their building and got a firsthand look at what he said was a fragmented commercial real estate mortgage industry.

Companies like Blend are addressing the problem of real estate lending, Zar told TechCrunch, but very few are focusing on commercial real estate, where lending is sensitive to interest rates and total amortization. In addition, property owners have a burden of refinancing every five to 10 years.

“Legacy businesses like JLL, which is an investor, Cushman Wakefield and CBRE work on lending, but they are much more ‘relationship focused’ than tech focused,” Zar said. “We think that it is a necessary part because the deals are so large and complex that you need a relationship for them, but transactions less than $1 billion are pretty straightforward. On experience and product, no one is close to us.”

Initially, Zar and his team wanted to build the “Rocket Mortgage of commercial real estate lending,” but found that to be difficult because real estate brokers are putting together their own pitch books for lenders. Instead, Lev is building a technology platform of more than 5,000 lenders with information on what projects they like to finance. It then analyzes a customer’s portfolio and connects them in minutes with the right lender, taking 1% of the loan amount for each transaction as payment. Lev is also working to be able to close deals online.

Zar wasn’t looking for funding when he was approached by investors, but said he was introduced to some people who liked the company’s growth and trajectory and decided to accept the funding offer.

He intends to use the new funding on product development, with the aim of giving a term sheet in seconds and closing a loan in seven days. Right now it can take a week or two to get the term sheet and 45 to 90 days to close a loan.

The company has about 40 employees currently in its New York headquarters, Miami R&D center, Los Angeles outpost and remotely. Continued investments will be made to expand the team.

Lev grew 10 times in volume in the past year, closing approximately $100 million of loans in 2020. Zar expects to close over $1 billion in 2021.

“Customers come back to us repeatedly, and there are a ton of referrals,” Zar said. “We want to be the platform on which capital market transactions are processed. You need an advantage to network and find great deals. I don’t want to mess with that, but when you find it, bring it to us, we will close it and provide the asset management with the best option to close online and manage the deal from a single platform.”

Meanwhile, Pete Flint, general partner at NFX, told TechCrunch that he got to know the Lev team over the last 18 months, checking in on the company during various stages of the global pandemic, and was impressed at how the company navigated it.

As co-founder of Trulia, he saw firsthand the problems in the real estate industry over search and discovery, but as that problem was being solved, the focus shifted to financing. NFX is also an investor in Tomo and Ribbon, which both focus on residential financing.

Wanting to see what opportunities were on the commercial real estate side, Flint heard Lev’s name come up more and more among brokers and industry insiders.

“As we got to know the Lev team, we recognized that they were the best team out there to solve this problem,” Flint said. “We are also among an amazing group of people complementing the round. The folks that are deep industry insiders will put a helpful lens on strategy and business development opportunities.”

News: Path Robotics raises another $100M

• July 20, 2021
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In May, Path Robotics announced a $56 million Series B. It was a sizable raise, as far as robotics rounds go. But the Columbus, Ohio-based startup is already back for more, raising a “pre-emptive” Series C a mere two and a half months later. And it’s a biggie. The firm has raised $100 million, led

In May, Path Robotics announced a $56 million Series B. It was a sizable raise, as far as robotics rounds go. But the Columbus, Ohio-based startup is already back for more, raising a “pre-emptive” Series C a mere two and a half months later.

And it’s a biggie. The firm has raised $100 million, led by Tiger Global and featuring participation from Silicon Valley Bank, an existing investor. The deal brings the robotic welding firm’s total funding to $171 million.

Image Credits: Path Robotics

Path cites a longstanding shortage of skilled welders as a primary driver in interest around its tech. The problem dates back before the global pandemic (though that’s likely only exacerbated the issue, as it has with so many other labor issues). Once again, it notes a study by the American Welding Society that says the U.S. alone will experience a shortage in the welding workface of around 400,000 by 2024.

From the sound of it, the company is already looking beyond welding. After all, construction is a huge business, with massive opportunities for the right robotics organization. And, of course, having an infusion of $100 million certainly doesn’t hurt your growth plans.

“Most robots merely repeat what they are told, with no ability to improve themselves. The future of manufacturing hinges on highly capable, flexible robotics,” CEO Andrew Lonsberry said in a statement. “Robots that can truly see and learn.”

Image Credits: Path Robotics

What, precisely, those future plans are, the company doesn’t say, but it plans to build them atop of its imaging and AI, presumably to build a sort of modular ecosystem for the construction robotics category.

Tiger Global partner Griffin Schroeder hints at those plans in a statement. “Path’s innovative approach to computer vision and proprietary AI software allows robots to sense, understand and adapt to the challenges of each unique welding project. We believe this breakthrough technology can be adopted for many other applications and products beyond just welding, to serve their customers holistically.”

News: Rad Power Bikes reveals more user-friendly next gen e-bike RadRover 6 Plus for $1,999

• July 20, 2021
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Electric fat tire bike manufacturer Rad Power Bikes has unveiled the latest model of its flagship RadRover, and at $1,999, it appears to be cheaper than its predecessor, which goes for $1,699. The updates on the RadRover 6 Plus are emblematic of the company’s mission to enhance rider experience, especially for those who don’t identify

Electric fat tire bike manufacturer Rad Power Bikes has unveiled the latest model of its flagship RadRover, and at $1,999, it appears to be cheaper than its predecessor, which goes for $1,699. The updates on the RadRover 6 Plus are emblematic of the company’s mission to enhance rider experience, especially for those who don’t identify as bike riders but are looking for a more eco-friendly way to travel.

“We develop powerful, reliable bikes, bikes that are confidence-inspiring and easy to use,” Redwood Stephens, chief product officer of Rad Power Bikes, told TechCrunch. “We’ve completely redesigned the system to have a new user interface, big buttons, big text illuminated. The power button is in Rad orange, so when you walk up to the bike it says, ‘I’m the power button!’ to you. You don’t even have to tell somebody how to turn on the bike. The same with the power assist levels. You’ve got big up and down arrows which are super easy to use.”

Stephens said the company’s goal is to get people out of cars. Rad Power’s main customers aren’t urban bikers, and at 73 pounds a bike, it’s not hard to see why – Try lugging that up your third floor walkup. Rather, they’re people over 50 in suburban or rural areas who want another travel option besides their four-wheeled vehicle and would definitely benefit from letters symbols on their e-bike that are as large as those on their cell phones, according to data collected by the company.

In February, Rad Power Bikes raised $150 million from investors like Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global Fund and Fidelity Management & Research Company. It used the funds, one of the largest of a U.S. electric bike startup, to scale globally, expanding beyond the $100 million in sales it generated in 2019.

Now, with over 350,000 bikes on the roads, Rad Power Bikes is settling into its direct-to-consumer approach with a thoughtful strategy, one that integrates everything from the design and robustness of the vehicle to the price point to the delivery and packaging.

“So in a nutshell it’s about reducing friction of the user experience throughout the whole lifetime of the product,” said Stephens. “It starts with the information that we have on our website to the box arriving with your bike in it and a QR code on a box that says, ‘Here’s the link to the unpackaging video,’ and then thinking about how to make that as smooth as possible for the end user.”

Stephens says the company is so concerned with a smooth customer experience, right down to how you take the bike out of its box, that Rad Power’s packaging and designing engineers work right alongside the bike designers so that the direct-to-consumer experience is considered throughout the design process. In other words, nothing is an afterthought.

In North America, customers who don’t want to unbox the bike themselves can opt for a white glove delivery service, complete with bike assembly.

What’s new with the RadRover 6 Plus?

Rad Power’s newest model is the first of its kind to feature hydraulic brakes and ceramic brakepads, which means riders will need to apply less pressure to slow down or stop, and they can expect brakepads to have a longer lifespan and require less maintenance. There’s also been some updates to the battery, which was designed in-house and lives directly in the frame of the bike, which not only looks kind of cool but it’s also easy to remove for indoor charging.

The frame itself has been re-engineered to accommodate shorter people, and the center of gravity has been lowered, which the company says should improve handling. The geared hub motor has 750 wattage of power, which is the same as the RadRover 5, but the company says the 6 Plus can handle hills 25% faster.

The suspension has also changed, but perhaps not for the better. The last model had 80 mm of travel, and the 6 Plus has 60 mm, which might mean there’s less space for the wheel to move before bottoming out, but according to the vehicle specs, the spring preload can be adjusted to suit various rider weights and terrain.

Finally, like the last model, this one comes with front, rear and brake lights, but it has the added benefit of activating the lights when the bike turns on and a new fender-mounted tail light.

Sounds great. Why is it so cheap?

Honestly, this seems like a steal. Where some e-bikes go for a cool $9,000, this one is surprisingly affordable at $1,999. Stephens says he doesn’t always know why other manufacturers are as expensive as they are.

“Our batteries use state-of-the-art Panasonic or Samsung cells, which are the same providers for the electric car industry, and so our packs are bigger,” he said. “Our motors and speed controllers are top notch, and our bikes are very reliable in the industry. Our motors last a long time. We see many of our riders with over 10,000 miles on their bike and still going.”

Stephens speculates that the biggest differentiator between Rad Power and many other e-bike providers is the supply chain. Rad Power designs its bikes from the ground up, so it doesn’t buy off-the-shelf products, like motors, displays and batteries, from a company like Bosch.

“There are less middlemen, less people in the manufacturing supply chain for us marking up systems,” he said. “And because we’re direct-to-consumer, there’s no markup from the retail shop to the consumer.”

Rad Power has manufacturing locations in China, Taiwan and Thailand that make the components the company designs and sends them at a very large scale, which also helps to keep the price down.

The company has four retail stores in Seattle, San Diego, Vancouver and Europe where it also sells its bikes, and it has also set up a partner network with local bike shops that are certified to work on its bikes and even assemble them from the box at customers’ homes. Stephens said the company is on track to have 75% of its U.S. customers have rad service available to them this year.