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News: 4 essential truths about venture investing

• February 24, 2021
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After making pre-seed investments for seven years, I’ve observed how different the pre-seed stage is from Series A and later-stage investing. Today, I want to highlight four ideas that are true across different stages of investing.

After making pre-seed investments for seven years, I have observed how different the pre-seed stage is from Series A and later-stage investing.

Today, I want to highlight four ideas that are true across different stages of investing.

Venture outcomes are driven by a power law

Power law is an immutable law of the universe. Examples include the distribution of population in cities, price of artwork, and unfortunately, wealth distribution. This law is also known as the Pareto principle, and colloquially known as the 80%-20% rule.

Venture capital is no exception and the outcomes of every venture portfolio will likely follow a power law distribution. There are two significant things to think about here:

One: Because most startups fail, the distribution is going to have a lot of zeros (or near zeros) in the long tail. The zeros are going to be followed by singles and doubles.

Two: The biggest winners, when they happen, tend to be huge. Unicorns were hard to come by when Aileen Lee penned her now-famous article in 2013. Today, unicorns are no longer as rare and top-tier firms are constructing their portfolio with the goal of funding a decacorn — a company valued at $10 billion or higher.

There is nothing mysterious about the power law dynamic in venture. Just like the rich get richer, the biggest companies get bigger.

A startup that reaches $10 million in revenue is much more likely to double, double again and then cruise by $100 million in revenue versus a startup at the $1 million mark now trying to get to $10 million.

At scale, everything is different — the resources, the possibilities and access to capital. Of course, even companies that reach very substantial scale may run into obstacles and eventually underperform. But that is not the point.

The point is that the ones that do end up winning and driving all the returns keep doubling and continue getting bigger and bigger.

Hence, the outcomes of the venture portfolio fit a power law curve.

The best managers in the business are distinguished by a few more at the very top of the curve.

The average manager faces a very real possibility of making no money at all because of how steep the power law curve is.

Your fund size is your strategy

There is a piece of feedback that fund of fund managers frequently give to GPs: Your fund size is your strategy.

What they are essentially saying is that a fund’s portfolio construction will depend on how much capital is under management, and vice versa. Why is that?

Let’s take two extreme examples — a manager of a $10 million fund and a manager of a $1 billion fund. Let’s assume that both managers want to lead rounds. If the first one decided to be a Series A fund, it would be extremely concentrated. It may be able to lead 1-2 rounds, but that’s it. Given the power law nature of outcomes, it would be extremely unlikely for this manager to generate a good return.

News: Metal 3D printing startup Mantle launches out of stealth with $13M in funding

• February 24, 2021
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Additive manufacturing has been a popular buzz phrase for decades now. With a smattering of notable exceptions, however, 3D printing has largely been focused on rapid prototyping and limited-run, personal products. Metal 3D printing companies like Mantle represent an intriguing use case on the road to truly scaling the tech to mass manufacturing. Arriving out

Additive manufacturing has been a popular buzz phrase for decades now. With a smattering of notable exceptions, however, 3D printing has largely been focused on rapid prototyping and limited-run, personal products. Metal 3D printing companies like Mantle represent an intriguing use case on the road to truly scaling the tech to mass manufacturing.

Arriving out of stealth today, the Bay Area-based company is not focused on replacing traditional manufacturing methods, as much as augmenting and improving them. Specifically, the startup is focusing its technology in helping creating better molds and dies for manufacturers.

There are, of course, a number of companies currently competing in the printable metal category. Notable names include Desktop Metal, ExOne and Markforged. Armed with $13 million in funding from Foundation Capital, Hypertherm Ventures, Future Shape, 11.2 capital, Plug and Play Ventures and Corazon Capital, Mantle seeks to differentiate itself with a machine capable of removing some steps from the process.

“The main difference, having interacted with 3D printing for close to three decades, is really around the focus on these use cases that are production oriented,” Foundation Capital General Partner Steve Vassallo tells TechCrunch. “The vast majority of 3D printing is to make a prototype as quickly as possible. To actually make something that can be used in production environments — real parts that you can use — has never been done before.”

The company’s machine (roughly “The size of two standing desks” its says) builds part finishing into the process.

“Ours is the first sintering-based hybrid technology that does shape refinement prior to going into the furnace,” CEO Ted Sorom tells TechCrunch. “We do it with a unique material that’s designed not only to be deposited into a very dense body but to also be cut with high-speed cutting tools. That allows us to get a totally different level of surface detail than anyone’s able to get today.”

The company has thus far announced L’Oréal as its first partner. The cosmetics giant will be using Mantle’s printers to create precision molds for products and packaging.

Tony Fadell, of Future Shape Mantle, added in a comment offered to TechCrunch, “Mantle gives you the superpowers to make Apple-quality mechanical parts in days not months and lowers your cost by orders of magnitude. That speed and affordability lets you iterate to get your parts to perfection and still lets you launch much earlier.”

News: Hydrolix snares $10M seed to lower the cost of processing log data at scale

• February 24, 2021
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Many companies spend a significant amount of money and resources processing data from logs, traces and metrics, forcing them to make trade-offs about how much to collect and store. Hydrolix, an early stage startup, announced a $10 million seed round today to help tackle logging at scale, while using unique technology to lower the cost

Many companies spend a significant amount of money and resources processing data from logs, traces and metrics, forcing them to make trade-offs about how much to collect and store. Hydrolix, an early stage startup, announced a $10 million seed round today to help tackle logging at scale, while using unique technology to lower the cost of storing and querying this data.

Wing Venture Capital led the round with help from AV8 Ventures, Oregon Venture Fund and Silicon Valley Data Capital.

Company CEO and co-founder Marty Kagan noted that in his previous roles, he saw organizations with tons of data in logs, metrics and traces that could be valuable to various parts of the company, but most organizations couldn’t afford the high cost to maintain these records for very long due to the incredible volume of data involved. He started Hydrolix because he wanted to change the economics to make it easier to store and query this valuable data.

“The classic problem with these cluster-based databases is that they’ve got locally attached storage. So as the data set gets larger, you have no choice but to either spend a ton of money to grow your cluster or separate your hot and cold data to keep your costs under control,” Kagan told me.

What’s more, he says that when it comes to querying, the solutions out there like BigQuery and Snowflake are not well suited for this kind of data. “They rely really heavily on caching and bulk column scans, so they’re not really useful for […] these infrastructure plays where you want to do live stream ingest, and you want to be able to do ad hoc data exploration,” he said.

Hydrolix wanted to create a more cost-effective way of storing and querying log data, while solving these issues with other tooling. “So we built a new storage layer which delivers […] SSD-like performance using nothing but cloud storage and diskless spot instances,” Kagan explained. He says that this means that there is no caching or column scales, enabling them to do index searches. “You’re getting the low cost, unlimited retention benefits of cloud storage, but with the interactive performance of fully indexed search,” he added.

Peter Wagner, founding partner at investor Wing Venture Capital, says that the beauty of this tool is that it eliminates tradeoffs, while lowering customers overall data processing costs. “The Hydrolix team has built a real-time data platform optimized not only to deliver superior performance at a fraction of the cost of current analytics solutions, but one architected to offer those same advantages as data volumes grow by orders of magnitude,” Wagner said in a statement.

It’s worth pointing out that in the past couple of weeks SentinelOne bought high speed logging platform Scalyr for $155 million, then CrowdStrike grabbed Humio, another high speed logging tool for $400 million, so this category is getting attention.

The product is currently compatible with AWS and offered through the Amazon Marketplace, but Kagan says they are working on versions for Azure and Google Cloud and expect to have those available later this year. The company was founded at the end of 2018 and currently has 20 employees spread out over six countries with headquarters in Portland, Oregon.

News: Scope AR launches a browser-based AR creation platform for the enterprise

• February 24, 2021
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Enticing the enterprise world to embrace augmented reality has proven a more difficult task than many startups in the AR space anticipated, but as the hardware and software behind the tech becomes increasingly commodified, customers are starting to find use cases that align with their shifting remote workflows. Scope AR has been selling the vision

Enticing the enterprise world to embrace augmented reality has proven a more difficult task than many startups in the AR space anticipated, but as the hardware and software behind the tech becomes increasingly commodified, customers are starting to find use cases that align with their shifting remote workflows.

Scope AR has been selling the vision of using 3D models to help the manufacturing industry scale training and collaboration since they launched back in 2010. Now, the startup is looking to build a more scalable future for themselves as they revamp their central product WorkLink for the web, Scope AR CEO Scott Montgomerie tells TechCrunch.

The new platform called WorkLink Create allows customers to sidestep complexity and author 3D content on top of CAD models without using Unity, an effort to make the product more approachable to non-technical users and customers that might not have access to Unity developers to roll out an integration.

“Unity is awesome but to do anything you have to code,” Montgomerie tells TechCrunch, calling WorkLink Create a “more user-friendly and scalable” option compared to software from its competitors.

The browser-based platform allows users to upload 3D files and edit them with comments, detailed instructions and animations via a drag-and-drop interface. The platform automatically scales down the level of detail on CAD models to meet the capabilities of the devices that will be rendering them. Once published, a customer’s users can access the models and instructions via WorkLink’s mobile and HoloLens apps.

Image via Scope AR

Scope AR’s focus on commercial education, on-the-job training and troubleshooting have seen renewed interest as COVID era guidelines have pushed more meetings into virtual spaces.

While AR hasn’t seen the full embrace of the COVID-era digital transformation, the remote work boom in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has also boosted business for Scope AR’s products, Montgomerie says. With the company expanding its list of customers while also helping frontline manufacturing operations that have aimed to quickly build and repair medical equipment necessary for COVID-19 testing and treatment.

Montgomerie says that he had always expected AR adoption to take some time, but the the slow pace of AR headset adoption had exceeded his expectations, something that has pushed the company to fully embrace mobile-based AR integrations on phones and tablets over the years. Scope AR is an authorized reseller of the HoloLens 2, though HoloLens makes its own remote collaboration software for enterprise users as well called Remote Assist.

Scope AR closed a $9.7 million Series A back in 2019 — the bulk of the company’s nearly $12 million raised to date from investors.

News: Noya Labs turns cooling towers into direct air capture devices for CO2 emissions

• February 24, 2021
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Not every company’s founders find themselves on a first name basis with the local bomb squad, but then again not every company is Noya Labs, which wants to turn the roughly 2 million cooling towers at industrial sites and buildings across the U.S. into CO2 sucking weapons in the fight against global climate change. When

Not every company’s founders find themselves on a first name basis with the local bomb squad, but then again not every company is Noya Labs, which wants to turn the roughly 2 million cooling towers at industrial sites and buildings across the U.S. into CO2 sucking weapons in the fight against global climate change.

When the company first started developing prototypes of its devices that attach to water coolers, the company’s founders, Josh Santos and Daniel Cavero, did what all good founders do, they started building in their backyard.

The sight of a 55 gallon oil drum, a yellow refrigeration tank in a sous vide bath attached to red and blue cables didn’t sit so well with the neighbors, so Santos and Cavero found themselves playing host to the bomb squad multiple times, according to the company’s chief executive, Santos.

“We proved that it could capture CO2, and we achieved something that no startup should achieve,” Santos said of the dubious bomb squad distinction.

Santos and Cavero were inspired to begin their experiments with direct air capture by an article describing some research into plants’ declining ability to capture carbon dioxide that Santos read on the Caltrain on his way to work back in 2019. That article spurred the would-be entrepreneur and his roommate to get to work on experimenting with carbon chemistry.

Their first product was a consumer air purifier that would pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in homes and capture it. Homeowners could then sell the captured gases to Santos and Cavero who would then resell it. But the two quickly realized that the business model wasn’t economical, and went back to the drawing board.

They found their eventual application in industrial cooling towers, which the company’s tech can turn into CO2 capturing devices that have the capacity to take in between half a ton and a ton of carbon dioxide per day.

Noya’s tech works by adding a blend of CO2 absorbing chemicals to the water in the cooling towers. They then add an attachment to the cooling tower that activates what Santos called a regeneration process to convert the captured CO2 back into gas. Once they have captured the CO2 the company will look to resell it to industrial Co2 consumers.

It’s not green yet, at least not exactly, because that CO2 is being recirculated instead of sequestered, but Santos said it’s greener existing sources of the gas, which come from ammonia and ethanol plants.

Noya Labs co-founders Josh Santos and Daniel Cavero. Image Credit: Noya Labs

“Five years from now we fully intend to have vertically integrated carbon capture and sequestration. Our first step is locally produced low cost atmospherically captured CO2,” said Santos. “If we were to go all in on a carbon capture that would require a lot of time for us to develop. What this initial model allows us to do is fine tune our capture technology while building up longterm to go to market.”

Santos called it the “Tesla roadster approach” so that the company can build up capital and get revenue and prove one piece of it as an MVP so they can prove other steps of it down the line.

Noya Labs already is developing a pilot plant with the Alexandre Family Farm that should capture between the estimated half a ton and one ton target.

To develop the initial pilot and build out its team, the company has managed to raise $1.2 million from the frontier tech investment firm Fifty Years, founded by Ela Madej and Seth Bannon, and Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital (whose mission statement to invest in companies that will buy time to “unf*ck the planet” might be one of the greatest). The company’s also in Y Combinator.

“One of the things that makes us excited about this technology is that in the U.S. alone there are 2 million cooling towers. Looking conservatively — if our initial pilot plant can capture 1 ton per day — we’re at right over half a gigaton of CO2 capture.”

And companies are already raising their hands to pick up the CO2 that Noya would sell on the market. There’s a growing collection of startups that are using CO2 to make products. These companies range from the slightly silly, like Aether Diamonds, which uses CO2 to make… diamonds; to companies like Dimensional Energy or Prometheus fuels, which make synthetic fuels with CO2, or Opus12, which uses CO2 in its replacements for petrochemicals.

Prices for commercial CO2 range between $125 per ton to $5,000 per ton, according to Santos. And Noya would be producing at less than $100 per ton. Current Direct Air Capture companies sell their CO2 from somewhere between $600 to $700 per ton.

Stoya’s first installation could cost around $250,000, Santos said. For Bannon, that means the company passes his “Mr. Burns test.”

“We’ve been digging into the DAC space but haven’t liked the techno-economics we’ve seen. Previous approaches have had too much capex and opex and not enough revenue potential,” Bannon wrote in an email. “That’s what Noya has solved. By leveraging existing industrial equipment, their model is profitable. And better yet, they make their carbon capture partners money, allowing them to scale this up fast. This creates an opportunity to profitably remove 1 gigaton plus a year.”

News: Robotics company Berkshire Grey to go public via SPAC

• February 24, 2021
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As far as fundraising goes, Berkshire Grey is in pretty good shape. When I visited its Massachusetts headquarters last year, following a massive $263 million Series B, the company discussed some pretty aggressive growth plans. Mind you, that was before the pandemic has really touched down in the U.S. in a meaningful way. If anything,

As far as fundraising goes, Berkshire Grey is in pretty good shape. When I visited its Massachusetts headquarters last year, following a massive $263 million Series B, the company discussed some pretty aggressive growth plans. Mind you, that was before the pandemic has really touched down in the U.S. in a meaningful way.

If anything, Covid-19 has accelerated interest in automation, as companies look to safeguard themselves from the inevitable effects of future pandemics. Today, Berkshire Gray announced its intention to become the latest tech company to go public by way of SPAC. The deal, which finds its merging with Revolution Acceleration Acquisition, could value the company at up to $2.7 billion.

In a release tied to the news, BG cites a 5% current warehouse automation figure – a number I’ve heard tossed around a lot in relation to these deals. It certainly points big potential for growth among retailers looking to streamline fulfillment, logistics and the like. For many, it’s as simple as finding a way to stay competitive with the likes of Amazon, which has massively bolstered its own robotics efforts through acquisitions like Kiva Systems.

BG offers a kind of ground-up solution for close to full automation. The technology separates it from more plug and play automation solutions like Locus and Fetch Robotics. Their offerings are more focused on automating companies faster and more cheaply. BG’s ecosystem includes a variety of different robotics, including picking, gripping and image sensing, with north of 300 patents in the space.

“Consumer expectations have changed, putting more pressure on supply chain operations to get the right goods to the right places at the right times, as efficiently as possible,” CEO Tom Wagner said in a release tied to the news. “Over the last 12 months the pandemic amplified the already high pressure to transform, so today it is no longer a question of if companies might transform but how quickly. We are incredibly excited about this transaction, which will enable Berkshire Grey to accelerate growth and provide new and existing customers with our leading robotics solutions.”

The deal would bring up up to $413 million in cash for the company. It says it plans to use the funding to address a backlog of customers and build out an international presence. It’s expected to close in Q2.

News: Malta’s energy storage tech to stabilize electricity grids reliant on renewables gets $50 million

• February 24, 2021
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As energy grids transition away from fossil fuels and towards the use of zero emission sources of power from primarily renewable energy sources, they’re going to need an ability to store and then use the massive amounts of energy that’s only generated intermittently by the sun and wind. That’s why technologies coming from companies like

As energy grids transition away from fossil fuels and towards the use of zero emission sources of power from primarily renewable energy sources, they’re going to need an ability to store and then use the massive amounts of energy that’s only generated intermittently by the sun and wind.

That’s why technologies coming from companies like Malta, an energy storage technology developer that just raised $50 million in new financing, are attracting attention and venture capital investment.

Malta spun out from the special projects group at Google’s parent company Alphabet and relies on some very old technologies combined in a novel way to provide long duration energy storage that can be discharged during times of peaking demand — like the conditions that effected Texas’ power grid last week.

The company’s latest round of funding was led by the Swiss natural gas, methanol, and agricultural conglomerate Proman; with participation from previous investors Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the nearly ubiquitous backer of renewable energy and sustainable startups, and Alfa Laval, which makes industrial filters and heat exchangers. Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook and the chief executive and co-founder of Asana, also participated in the round.

Heat exchangers are central to Malta’s approach, which is based on research from the Nobel Prize winning Stanford University physics professor, Robert Laughlin. In a 2017 paper, Laughlin proposed a system that used a thermal heat-pump tapping super-cold cryogenic storage fluids and superheated molten salt to store energy.

Building on that initial design, engineers at Alphabet’s moonshot factory, X, began developing a modified version of the designs Laughlin proposed.

That modified design is what’s now being developed by Malta, which spun out from X in 2018.

Ramya Swaminathan, Malta’s chief executive officer, who previously worked for the renewable energy project developer Rye Development, said that the current Malta system can store and dispatch energy with efficiency rates of around 60%. That’s… not great, but Swaminathan said that the declining costs of renewable power means that efficiency is less important as prices continue to come down the cost curve. “In practice we are heading towards a system where electricity is priced close to zero,” Swaminathan said. Indeed, as some grids employ negative pricing models when there’s a glut of electricity generated by wind and solar power, Malta’s tech becomes more appealing she said. 

Malta is far from the only company developing long-duration storage to solve the variable power production problem caused by the build out of renewable energy. Fortune had a whole dang article (which is actually something I’d wanted to write) listing the multiple companies that are tackling the energy storage dilemma.

They include companies like Energy Vault and Advanced Rail Energy Storage North America, which are both trying to use mechanical energy for long storage. In Energy Vault’s case that means using renewable power to lift huge one ton blocks of cement that can then be dropped to unleash that stored energy as power. ARES North America uses a similar concept, but instead of big honkin bricks, the company has trains that it moves to store and discharge energy.

Closer to Malta’s Cambridge, Mass. base of operations, a company called Form Energy is working on… something… that would compete with Malta’s energy storage system. That business was launched by some energy storage superstars, who previously had stints at companies like Tesla, the failed big battery tech developer Aquion, and A123 Systems (a granddaddy of the lithium ion battery revolution).

Malta’s system is able to discharge 100 megawatts over ten hours, which is equivalent to one gigawatt hour of production at a price tag that’s about price competitive with lithium ion batteries, according to Swaminathan.

The company is currently working on its first commercial scale plant, which it expects to commission in the 2024 or 2025 timeframe.

Meanwhile it’s competitors are already supplying power from pretty massive storage projects. Energy Vault has had a demonstration unit connected to the Swiss national utility grid that can discharge roughly 35 megawatt hours onto the grid, according to the company.

Companies like Proman like Malta because it can provide a ready customer for its chemicals and natural gas.

“There is an exponential global need for long-duration, low-cost energy storage solutions, and we are excited to work with the Malta team and our new partners to progress Malta’s highly scalable and technically robust solution,” said David Cassidy, Chief Executive of Proman, in a statement. “Alongside our investment, Proman will bring complementary design, engineering and construction expertise to the Malta PHES technology as we begin work with Malta on a commercial scale plant.”

News: The carbon offset API developer Patch confirms a $4.5 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz

• February 24, 2021
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Patch, the carbon offset API developer, has raised $4.5 million in financing to build out its business selling customers a way to calculate their carbon footprint and identify and finance offset projects that capture the equivalent carbon dioxide emissions associated with that footprint.  Confirming TechCrunch reporting, Andreessen Horowitz led the round, which also included previous

Patch, the carbon offset API developer, has raised $4.5 million in financing to build out its business selling customers a way to calculate their carbon footprint and identify and finance offset projects that capture the equivalent carbon dioxide emissions associated with that footprint. 

Confirming TechCrunch reporting, Andreessen Horowitz led the round, which also included previous investors VersionOne Ventures, MapleVC, and Pale Blue Dot Ventures.

Patch’s application protocol interface works for both internal and customer-facing operations. The company’s code can integrate into the user experience on a company’s internal site to track things like business flights for employees, recommending and managing the purchase of carbon credits to offset employee travel.

The software allows companies to choose which projects they’d like to finance to support the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with projects ranging from the tried and true reforestation and conservation projects to more high tech early stage technologies like direct air capture and sequestration projects, the company said. 

Patch founders Brennan Spellacy and Aaron Grunfeld, two former employees at the apartment rental service Sonder, stressed in an interview that the company’s offset work should not be viewed as an alternative to the decarbonization of businesses that use its service. Rather, they see Patch’s services as a compliment to other work companies need to do to transition away from a reliance on fossil fuels in business operations.

Patch co-founders Brennon Spellacy and Aaron Grunfeld. Image Credit: Patch

Patch currently works with 11 carbon removal suppliers and has plans to onboard another 10 before the end of the first quarter, the company said. These are companies like CarbonCure, which injects carbon dioxide into cement and fixes it so that it’s embedded in building materials for as long as a building lasts.

“Carbon removal credits can help to dramatically accelerate the deployment of technologies like CarbonCure’s, which are absolutely critical to helping us reach our global climate targets. Demand for high-quality, permanent credits is sky-rocketing, and listing credits on Patch will help us to attract a broader range of buyers,” said Jennifer Wagner, President of CarbonCure Technologies, in a statement. 

It also has around 15 customers already using its service, according to earlier TechCrunch reporting. Those buyers include companies like TripAction and the private equity firm EQT, which intends to extend the integration of Patch’s API from its own operations to those of its portfolio companies down the road, according to Spellacy.

Grunfeld said that the company would be spending the money to hire more staff and developing new products. From its current headcount of six employees, Patch intends to bring on another 24 by the end of the year.

As the company expands, it’s looking to some of the startups providing carbon emissions audit and verification services as a channel that the company’s API can integrate with and sell through.  These would be businesses like  CarbonChain, Persefoni, and another Y Combinator graduate, SINAI Technologies.

For project developers like CarbonCure, which makes direct air capture technology, companies like

“An increasing number of businesses are taking leadership positions in an effort to reduce emissions to try to counteract global warming,” said Jeff Jordan, Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Patch makes it much easier for companies to add carbon removal to their core business processes, aggregating verified carbon-removal supply and offering turn-key access to it to companies through an easy-to-implement API.”

News: ClimaCell plans to launch its own satellites to improve its weather predictions

• February 24, 2021
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The weather data and forecasting startup ClimaCell today announced that it plans to launch its own constellation of small weather satellites. These radar-equipped satellites will allow ClimaCell to improve its ability to get a better picture of global weather and improve its forecasting abilities. The company expects the first of these to launch in the

The weather data and forecasting startup ClimaCell today announced that it plans to launch its own constellation of small weather satellites. These radar-equipped satellites will allow ClimaCell to improve its ability to get a better picture of global weather and improve its forecasting abilities. The company expects the first of these to launch in the second half of 2022.

As ClimaCell CEO Shimon Elkabetz points out in today’s announcement, ground-based radar coverage, which allows you to get information about precipitation and cloud structure, remains spotty, even in the U.S., which in turn often makes even basic forecasting more difficult. And while there are (expensive) space-based radar satellites available, those often only revisit the same area every three days, limiting their usefulness. ClimaCell hopes that its constellation of small, specialized satellites will offer hourly revisit times.

We started with proprietary sensing and modeling to predict the weather more accurately at every point in the world, and built on top of it one software platform that can be configured to every job and vertical,” Elkabetz writes. “[…] Now, we are evolving into a SaaS company powered by Space: We’re launching a constellation of satellites to improve weather forecasting for the entire world. For the first time, a constellation of active radar will surround Earth and provide real-time observations to feed weather forecasting at every point on the globe.

That’s indeed a big step for the company, but we may just see more of this in the near future. While even 10 years ago it would have been hard for even a well-funded company to launch its own satellites, that’s quite different now. A number of factors contributed to this, ranging from easier access to launch services, breakthroughs in building these proprietary radar satellites and the availability of auxiliary services like ground stations as a service, which now even AWS and Microsoft offer, and a whole ecosystem of vendors that specialize in building these satellites. The ClimaCell team tells me that it is talking to a lot of vendors right now and will choose which one to go to later on.

News: Acumen nabs $7M seed to keep engineering teams on track

• February 24, 2021
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Engineering teams face steep challenges when it comes to staying on schedule, and keeping to those schedules can have an impact on the entire organization. Acumen, an Israeli engineering operations startup announced a $7 million seed investment today to help tackle this problem. Hetz, 10D, Crescendo and Jibe participated in the round, designed to give

Engineering teams face steep challenges when it comes to staying on schedule, and keeping to those schedules can have an impact on the entire organization. Acumen, an Israeli engineering operations startup announced a $7 million seed investment today to help tackle this problem.

Hetz, 10D, Crescendo and Jibe participated in the round, designed to give the startup the funding to continue building out the product and bring it to market. The company, which has been working with beta customers for almost a year, also announced it was emerging from stealth today.

As an experienced startup founder, Acumen CEO and co-founder Nevo Alva has seen engineering teams struggle as they grow due to a lack of data and insight into how the teams are performing. He and his co-founders launched Acumen to give companies that missing visibility.

“As engineering teams scale, they face challenges due to a lack of visibility into what’s going on in the team. Suddenly prioritizing our tasks becomes much harder. We experience interdependencies [that have an impact on the schedule] every day,” Alva explained.

He says this manifests itself in a decrease in productivity and velocity and ultimately missed deadlines that have an impact across the whole company. What Acumen does is collect data from a variety of planning and communications tools that the engineering teams are using to organize their various projects. It then uses machine learning to identify potential problems that could have an impact on the schedule and presents this information in a customizable dashboard.

The tool is aimed at engineering team leaders, who are charged with getting their various projects completed on time with the goal of helping them understand possible bottlenecks. The software’s machine learning algorithms will learn over time what situations cause problems, and offer suggestions on how to prevent them from becoming major issues.

The company was founded in July 2019 and the founders spent the first 10 months working with a dozen design partners building out the first version of the product, making sure it could pass muster with various standards bodies like SOC-2. It has been in closed private beta since last year and is launching publicly this week.

Acumen currently has 20 employees with plans to add 10 more by the end of this year. After working remotely for most of 2020, Alva says that location is no longer really important when it comes to hiring. “It definitely becomes less and less important where they are. I think time zones still are still a consideration when speaking of remote,” he said. In fact, they have people in Israel, the US and eastern Europe at the moment among their 20 employees.

He recognizes that employees can feel isolated working alone, so the company has video meetings every day and spend the first part just chatting about non-work stuff as a way to stay connected. Starting today, Acumen will begin its go to market effort in earnest. While Alva recognizes there are competing products out there like Harness and Pinpoint, he thinks his company’s use of data and machine learning really helps differentiate it.