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

April 28, 2021
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TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising, our next mini bootcamp for founders in the early innings of their startup journey, takes place July 8-9. It sure seems a long way off, right? But you have only 48 hours left to save $100 on the price of admission. Invest and save with one decisive action.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 28, 2021
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SunRoof is a European startup that has come up with a clever idea. It has its own roof-tile technology which generates solar power. It then links up those houses, creating a sort of virtual power plant, allowing homeowners to sell surplus energy back to the grid. It’s now closed a €4.5 million round (Seed extension)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

News: Atlassian launches a Jira for every team

April 28, 2021
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Atlassian today announced a new edition of its Jira project management tool, Jira Work Management. The company has long been on a journey of bringing Jira to teams beyond the software development groups it started out with. With Jira Service Management, it is successfully doing that with IT teams. With Jira Core, it also moved further in this direction, but Jira Work Management takes this a step further. The idea here is to offer a version of Jira that enables teams across marketing, HR, finance, design and other groups to manage their work and — if needed — connect it to that of a company’s development teams.

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

Image Credits: Atlassian

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

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

Image Credits: Atlassian

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

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

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

Image Credits: Atlassian

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

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

Image Credits: Atlassian

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

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

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

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

Image Credits: Atlassian

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

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

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

Atlassian acquires ThinkTilt

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

April 28, 2021
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Uber is launching more than a half-dozen new features, including one that will let users book vaccine appointments at Walgreens and reserve a ride to get their jab, as the company homes in on a business model that will finally deliver profitability. The features, announced Wednesday, fall under what Uber is describing as its “go

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

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

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

Image Credits: Uber

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

News: Zomato juice: Indian unicorn’s proposed IPO could drive regional startup liquidity

April 28, 2021
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The IPO parade that has continued in 2021 is not a strictly domestic affair. Other countries are getting in on the unicorn liquidity rush. This week, India-based food-delivery unicorn Zomato filed to go public. As TechCrunch reported, the company intends to list “on Indian stock exchanges NSE and BSE.” The Zomato IPO is incredibly important.

The IPO parade that has continued in 2021 is not a strictly domestic affair. Other countries are getting in on the unicorn liquidity rush.

This week, India-based food-delivery unicorn Zomato filed to go public. As TechCrunch reported, the company intends to list “on Indian stock exchanges NSE and BSE.”

The Zomato IPO is incredibly important. As our own Manish Singh reported when the company’s numbers became public, a “successful listing [could be] poised to encourage nearly a dozen other unicorn Indian startups to accelerate their efforts to tap the public markets.” So, Zomato’s debut is not only notable because its impending listing gives us a look into its economics, but because it could lead to a liquidity rush in the country if its flotation goes well.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

At this point, we’ll pause and note that India is currently enduring a COVID-19 surge that may be without precedent. You can provide help here. May the pandemic abate quickly and with as little pain as possible.

Back to Zomato: The company’s IPO filing paints the picture of a quickly growing company derailed by the pandemic. However, the unicorn has posted rapid recovery in recent quarters, and its economics are maturing to the point when it can begin to craft a path to long-term profitability. This morning, let’s dig into its numbers and try to sort out why the company is going public now and how investors may vet its recent performance.

Zomato’s business

Zomato was last valued at around $5.4 billion in a February 2021 round that put $250 million into its operations. The unicorn has raised more than $2 billion to date, per Crunchbase data.

In business terms, Zomato offers more than merely food delivery. Per its IPO filing, the company’s food delivery business is supplemented by its “dining-out” capability that facilitates in-person eating, a raw materials business called “Hyperpure,” and Zomato Pro, a consumer offering that provides food discounts to its 1.4 million subscribers.

So we can’t merely compare the firm to, say, Uber Eats — the India operations of which Zomato bought back in the day — on a one-to-one basis.

But what we can track is the company’s aggregate financial performance through the end of 2020. The Zomato filing does not appear to include information regarding the company’s calendar Q1 2021 performance; that period, for reference, is the fourth quarter of the company’s fiscal 2021.

Let’s start from a very high level:

Fiscal year ending March 31, 2019: $187.4 million in total revenue, and a loss before exceptional items of $296.3 million.
Fiscal year ending March 31, 2020: $367.8 million in total revenue, and a loss before exceptional items of $303.5 million
Nine-month period ending December 31, 2020: $183.4 million in total revenue, and a loss before exceptional items of $47.8 million

News: 3D printing marketplace Shapeways set for SPAC

April 28, 2021
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Shapeways this morning confirmed earlier reports that it has entered into a deal to go public via SPAC. The model, which has become increasingly popular among tech companies in the past year, has already been taking up by a number of fellow 3D printing companies, including Markforged and Desktop Metal. “Our vision to enable anyone

“Our vision to enable anyone to rapidly transform digital designs to physical products is reaching a significant milestone today as we transition Shapeways into a public company,” CEO Greg Kress said in a release tied to the news. “We have been successfully executing on our vision, and this capital will allow us to empower digital manufacturing at scale, accelerating Shapeways’ additive manufacturing capabilities while expanding the Company’s material and technology offerings to more markets and industries.”

Founded back in 2007, the New York-based company (with Dutch roots) offers 3D printing as a service. Specifically, it lets users outsource the printing of 3D printing objects to its own army of industrial units. Included in its services is a marketplace where users can buy and sell 3D printed objects.

The company, which has raised north of $107 million per Crunchbase, will enter into a reverse merge with blank firm, Galileo Acquisition Corp. The deal would value Shapeways at $410 million and provide upwards of $195 million in proceeds. The money will go toward, “accelerat[ing] Shapeways’ metal additive manufacturing capabilities, expand[ind] the company’s material and technology offerings to extend market reach and grow customer share of wallet as well as to provid[ing] additional working capital.”

The deal, which is subject to the standard regulatory scrutiny, would list the company as “SHPW” in the NYSE. It’s expected to close this summer.

Metal 3D printing company Markforged announces plans to go public via SPAC

News: Splitwise raises $20M Series A to help everyone in the world divvy expenses

April 28, 2021
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This morning Splitwise, a Providence, Rhode Island-based startup announced that it has closed a $20 million Series A. The company builds consumer fintech software that helps users split expenses. But Splitwise isn’t a Venmo or Paytm clone. Instead of helping users wire money to their pals, the company leaves the transference of money to others.

This morning Splitwise, a Providence, Rhode Island-based startup announced that it has closed a $20 million Series A.

The company builds consumer fintech software that helps users split expenses. But Splitwise isn’t a Venmo or Paytm clone. Instead of helping users wire money to their pals, the company leaves the transference of money to others. Splitwise simply wants to help reduce the stress and awkwardness that money puts on relationships of all sorts, CEO Jon Bittner told TechCrunch in an interview.

Roommates, partners, married couples with distinct finances, or just friends going on skiing trips all have to deal with shared expenses. And tracking down your friends or spouse or roomie for their cut of a cost is zero fun. Splitwise’s software makes it easier to track and come to terms with shared expenses. By keeping those costs in the open, and whom owes who, the app wants to keep debts clear so that folks don’t have to trip over each other when it comes to money.

The product concept has found a global audience. Per Bittner, Splitwise has attracted tens of millions of registered user who have shared or managed what it calculates to be $90 billion since 2011. The startup declined to share active user numbers, but as it is merely raising a Series A we gave it an early-stage pass on more concrete usage metrics.

Since Splitwise leaves the transference of monies amongst its users to others, it doesn’t make money off of transaction fees or stored consumer funds. So how does it make cash? By charging users $3 per month for its Pro service. Or more simply, Splitwise offers a consumer subscription to users who need more powerful cost-sharing software.

We lack metrics to illustrate how Splitwise’s subscription user-base looks, but Bittner said that the company’s conversion rate from free to paid has not declined as Splitwise’s free user base has scaled. We can infer, however, that as Insight Partners was willing to lead a $20 million investment into the company, its paid subscriber base is growing at at least a reasonable clip.

Before its Series A, Bittner told TechCrunch that his company had raised around $9 million.

Splitwise has long grown organically. As it was able to attract new users without paid spend, it managed to keep its costs low. That meant that it didn’t need to raise venture capital at the same velocity as some other consumer fintech companies. But by keeping its fundraising to a minimum, the company had to be somewhat careful in where it pointed its resources.

Its CEO said that Splitwise said that the new capital will allow the company to boost its product cadence.

But don’t expect all the money to go to making paid-only features. Splitwise was clear to TechCrunch that it wants its free experience to be sufficiently useful that users are willing to invite their friends to the service without risking bringing them into an overly-pushy commercial digital environment.

Its investors seem aligned with the thinking, with Insight Partners’ Boris Treskunov saying in a statement that he’s “excited to see the app become the go-to platform for easy cost-splitting among friends and family.” Mass adoption of that sort will require a robust free experience. Which means continued spend on the free-side of the startup’s freemium product work.

Splitwise is perhaps Providence’s best-known startup, though the recent Y Combinator graduate Pangea is giving it a run for its money lately when it comes to local notoriety. Regardless, the two companies are evidence that it’s possible to build growing tech companies outside of the handful of American cities most associated with startup work. Let’s see what Splitwise can do with its new capital, and what percent of its future hiring winds up being remote, versus local to its main hub.

Internal rates of return in emerging US tech hubs are starting to overtake Silicon Valley

News: How Shopify aims to level the playing field with its machine learning-driven model of lending

April 28, 2021
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Shopify is widely known for giving independent merchants a platform to start, run, market and manage their businesses. But over the past 5 years, the company has been steadily growing another part of its own business: Shopify Capital. Through this arm, the Canadian commerce giant revealed today that it has provided $2 billion in funding

Shopify is widely known for giving independent merchants a platform to start, run, market and manage their businesses.

But over the past 5 years, the company has been steadily growing another part of its own business: Shopify Capital. Through this arm, the Canadian commerce giant revealed today that it has provided $2 billion in funding to tens of thousands of entrepreneurs.

Besides being a cool milestone, how it works is interesting. Merchants don’t necessarily have to apply for loans. Shopify’s machine learning models identify eligible merchants based on their previous sales history and store performance, according to Solmaz Shahalizadeh, vice president of data science and engineering, commerce intelligence at Shopify. If a merchant accepts a pre-approved offer, they can generally receive funding in 2 to 5 business days.

While the milestone is significant, I was especially intrigued by the model by which Shopify lends money to its merchants.

It is intentional about using machine learning and AI “to make sure offers are based on factors different from any other in the financial industry,” Shahalizadeh said. “We don’t ask for a business plan. Our models see the business performance and it’s potential and makes an offer based on that.”

“We use 70 million data points to understand larger trends across the platform for merchants, and can see they are growing before they even can so we can preemptively offer them,” she added.

Kaz Nejatian, vice president of merchant services at Shopify, emphasizes that Shopify Capital does not lend in the manner of traditional banks by charging interest on loans.

“Our funding is designed to work off sales. If you don’t sell anything, we don’t get paid back until you make sales,” Nejatian said. “It’s a highly merchant aligned form of funding designed to fund the type of people banks and VCs won’t fund.”

The company’s model also aims to eliminate any biases that exist in the current financial system, when it comes to educational background, ethnicity, race or gender, he added.

For Nejatian, it’s also personal. His mother is a Shopify merchant who herself struggled with getting capital herself last year.

“Our goal is to reduce barriers to entrepreneurship by offering access to funds,” he said.

As part of that effort, Shopify Capital has increased the maximum amount of funding to $2 million. Previously, it granted funds ranging from $200 to $1 million.

Shopify offers two types of funding – merchant cash advances and loans. Shopify Capital charges a fixed fee (factor rate) on its financings.

On a merchant cash advance for example, it purchases $10,000 of a merchant’s future receivables in exchange for a promise to remit $10,900 of their future sales. The $900 is the amount it charges for the financing, and is repaid by a merchant’s daily remittances on days they make sales.

On its loans, it also applies a similar fixed fee to get a total repayment number, which is repaid via daily payments and milestone payments.

Simply put, the fixed fee that it charges is how Shopify earns money in exchange for funding our merchants. This fee, plus the amount advanced, are returned to the company over the life of a financing via daily remittance payments.

Says the company: “By charging a fixed fee, a merchant is able to understand exactly how much they’ll be expected to repay, before they take financing from Shopify Capital. These amounts don’t change over the life of a financing.”

Over time, Shopify plans to continually improve the machine learning algorithm behind Capital, making its predictive model “even smarter,” Shahalizadeh said.

“Our model allows us to predict merchants’ minimum sales with 90% accuracy while helping us make more proactive, pre-qualified offers as quickly as possible,” she added.

Shopify merchant Steven Borrelli, Founder of CUTS, says that when he was looking for funding as a newer business, he ran into the challenge of most traditional banks and lenders wanting to see that he had been in business for several years.

CUTS started with getting $2,000 in funding from Shopify Capital. Over the last three years, it has grown into a business with sales “in the tens of millions.”

“We found Shopify Capital to be so valuable that we’ve returned for 10 rounds of funding. Our most recent round of Shopify Capital was $1 million,” he said. “So far we’ve used the funding for expanding our product line and growing our inventory.”

News: Revel launches an all-electric, rideshare service with a fleet of 50 Teslas

April 28, 2021
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Revel started out in 2018 with shared, dockless e-mopeds in Brooklyn, which later expanded to Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx and a handful of other U.S. cities. This year, the company launched a monthly e-bike subscription in New York City and announced plans to build an electric vehicle charging hub in Bed-Stuy. Now, Revel is introducing

What once seemed like a company with an identity crisis dabbling at random with different forms of mobility is starting to come together as a calculated strategy to own the electrification infrastructure of cities, starting with NYC. This has been founder and CEO Frank Reig’s war cry from the start.

“From day one, our mission has been to electrify cities,” Reig told TechCrunch. “We do that by providing electric transportation options needed in cities, as well as building the electric vehicle infrastructure needed to make that happen.”

The new rideshare venture, which will launch in late May with a fleet of 50 Revel-branded Tesla Model Ys, is the natural next step in the process of working towards “electrifying every single trip in a city,” says Reig. Customers will be able to access ride-hailing services with the same app used to book e-mopeds. The launch will begin in a zone below 42nd Street, and will expand to additional neighborhoods based on demand and data from the initial phase, according to the company.

Revel’s rideshare launch is taking a similar approach to its initial moped launch three years ago, starting in a small area and slowly growing towards an overall goal of serving the entire city, according to co-founder Paul Suhey.

The company is still in the application process to become an approved operator with NYC’s Taxi & Limousine Commission. Revel’s initial application was approved, but there are a few more steps to acquiring a fully issued license.

“I think one reason we’re even coming out with this right now instead of waiting until everything is officially licensed and ready to go is because we’re employing drivers,” Suhey told TechCrunch. “When it comes to employing drivers, we need to get the word out. We need to be able to recruit and retain drivers now.”

Revel’s customer rates will be on par with competitors like Uber and Lyft, Reig says, but rather than relying on gig economy workers, the company intends to hire all of its drivers.

“For the same price, you’re able to get into a fully electric vehicle with a company that actually employs New Yorkers and doesn’t push all the insurance risk and asset depreciation onto New York City residents just trying to make a living,” said Reig.

Micromobility’s next big business is software, not vehicles

Paying workers is not just altruism for Revel. It makes more sense to employ drivers because the company needs to own the Teslas, in large part so they can be built to Revel’s specifications. The Model Ys will be painted “Revel-blue” and will include a touchscreen to control cabin conditions like temperature and music. The front passenger seat of the vehicles will be removed to both adhere to Covid-19 distancing guidelines and to allow riders to stretch their legs.

But more importantly, Revel learned a valuable lesson from the $200 million PR campaign from the likes of Uber, Lyft and Postmates to lobby Californians to vote for Proposition 22, a ballot initiative which would make the app-based companies exempt from treating workers as employees with benefits. The initiative passed, but Reig is of the opinion that that money could have gone towards attracting and maintaining a solid workforce, rather than constantly trying to fill the funnel of drivers with a disillusioned labor pool.

“There’s also a safety piece when you’re talking about a fleet,” said Reig. “Because it’s our fleet, we’re able to understand exactly the acceleration, the speed and the braking of the car at all times. Every single driver that we employ and train will be getting safety scores at the end of every shift so they can improve their driving. So now, we’re able to lower insurance costs and liabilities.”

As cities electrify, Revel wants to be the one scaffolding the business models going forward. Offering up a ride-hail is not just about building out a new business line. It’s also about accelerating the production of the company’s charging business. Revel’s trying to establish an electric monopoly while solving for the chicken-and-egg problem of prospective EV buyers who would buy electric if only there were charging stations and planners who would build EV infrastructure if only more people were buying EVs.

“Everything that we do as a company is about trying to drive EV adoption and access to electric mobility in cities,” said Suhey. “People think about that in terms of access to a different mode, whether that’s an electric car, an electric bike, a moped — we’re thinking more broadly about electrification in cities.”

Tamika Butler, Remix’s Tiffany Chu and Revel’s Frank Reig to discuss how to balance equitability and profitability at TC Sessions: Mobility

News: Dear Sophie: What’s the latest on DACA?

April 28, 2021
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My company is looking to hire a very talented data infrastructure engineer who is undocumented. She has never applied for DACA before. What is the latest on DACA? What can we do to support her?

Sophie Alcorn
Contributor

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Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives.

What’s the latest on DACA?

In good news for many in the United States, the DACA program has largely returned to what it was when the Obama administration created it through an executive order in 2012. At the end of last year, a federal judge ordered U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to accept and adjudicate new DACA applications, which had stopped in September 2017 when the previous administration announced it was ending DACA.

Moreover, President Joe Biden issued a memorandum on his first day in office stating that the secretary of Homeland Security, who oversees USCIS, should “fortify and preserve DACA.”

Your company can support an undocumented engineer by offering to pay for the services of an immigration attorney to assist her with filing applications for DACA and an employment authorization document (EAD), also known as a work permit. It may take several months for her applications to be processed. The approvals will allow her to be legally hired in the United States.

Image Credits: Joanna Buniak / Sophie Alcorn (opens in a new window)

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News: Dear Sophie: What’s the latest on DACA?

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