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News: China’s WeRide unveils Robovan, its first electric, autonomous cargo van

• September 9, 2021
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Chinese autonomous driving company WeRide has unveiled its first cargo van, the vessel upon which it will self-drive into the world of urban logistics. WeRide will work with Chinese automobile manufacturer Jiangling Motors (JMC) and Chinese express delivery company ZTO Express to commercialize its first self-driving van at scale. The deal was signed on Wednesday

Chinese autonomous driving company WeRide has unveiled its first cargo van, the vessel upon which it will self-drive into the world of urban logistics. WeRide will work with Chinese automobile manufacturer Jiangling Motors (JMC) and Chinese express delivery company ZTO Express to commercialize its first self-driving van at scale.

The deal was signed on Wednesday by Tony Han, founder and CEO of WeRide, Wenhui Jin, executive vice president of JMC, and Renqun Jin, vice president of ZTO, during WeRide’s latest online press conference dubbed “The Next.” As part of the agreement, WeRide and JMC will jointly design purpose-built models of the Robovan for mass production on JMC’s assembly lines, and ZTO will put the Robovans to good use in their urban logistics service, according to a statement released by the company. A WeRide spokesperson told TechCrunch that the Robovans will be based on JMC’s battery electric vehicle model with a fully-redundant vehicle platform, combined with WeRide’s full-stack software and hardware autonomous driving (AD) solutions.

WeRide has been raking in cash over the past year on its route to commercialization, with over $600 million raised from Series B and C rounds in the span of five months and a current $3.3 billion valuation. In June, the company acquired MoonX.AI, a Guangzhou-based autonomous trucking company, although it hasn’t yet committed to developing a commercial product in that space yet. Either way, having ride-hailing, autonomous busing, urban logistics and even just a hint of self-driving trucks in the pipeline means WeRide’s moves to diversify its autonomous portfolio are edging it ahead of the competition.

Chinese search engine Baidu’s self-driving unit mainly focuses on robotaxi and, as of April this year, buses. Alongside its robotaxis, Pony.AI has at least piloted last-mile logistics and just recently got the go-ahead to test its trucks out in China, but so far no buses. Waymo Via knocks both last-mile and trucking off the list, and its autonomous taxis make for a very long feather in the company’s cap, but Waymo hasn’t yet released any news about self-driving buses. GM-backed Cruise seems to be sticking with small vehicles and all they can provide, which includes rideshare and delivery.

WeRide says its van already has Level 4 autonomous capabilities, which the Society of Automotive Engineers defines as a car that takes the wheel and doesn’t require human interaction in most cases, although a human still has the option to manually override. Level 4 vehicles can only operate in limited areas, which is why they have most recently catered to ridesharing, but delivery vehicles could conceivably operate within a geofence, as well.

Because WeRide already has two years of experience testing out its Robotaxi service with the public, the company says it’s confident that the Robovan will be able to handle itself in a variety of different traffic scenarios, from innercity to tunnels to highways, across ZTO’s network, which covers over 99% of China’s cities and counties, according to ZTO.

A WeRide spokesperson said the Robovan has already been built and has been quietly tested in China for some time now. It’s still too early in the process to provide a detailed timeline on when WeRide and JMC will begin mass production, but the spokesperson said the next step for WeRide will be to pick one to three locations to conduct pilot testing to verify the vehicles and the system’s stability.

“Right after that, we aim for being true driverless in a few areas and build up our know-how of operating Robovans in urban logistics application,” the spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Considering both Robovan and Robotaxi are operating in urban cities, Robovan shares similar regulatory support as Robotaxi. Regulation in China is progressing step by step to catch up with the development of self-driving technology. You will see the application of true driverless Robovan in three to five years.”

News: Printify bags $45M, led by Index, to ride the custom printing boom

• September 9, 2021
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The creator economy loves merch which is great news for on-demand custom printing startups such as Latvia-based Printify — today it’s announcing a $45 million Series A round, led by Index Ventures, off the back of rising demand for its services. The mission: To keep growing its global marketplace of print shops to meet rising

The creator economy loves merch which is great news for on-demand custom printing startups such as Latvia-based Printify — today it’s announcing a $45 million Series A round, led by Index Ventures, off the back of rising demand for its services.

The mission: To keep growing its global marketplace of print shops to meet rising demand for custom wares, shipped.

Also participating in the funding round: H&M Group, Virgin Group, plus the founders of Transferwise, Vinted, Squarespace, RedHat, and entertainment industry investors including Will Smith’s Dreamers VC and NBA player Kristaps Porzingis.

TechCrunch understands Printify’s post-money valuation is just over $300M.

Ecommerce and creator-focused platforms like Patreon and Shopify — which cater to micro-brand creating individual sellers (be they designers, content creators, ecommerce entrepreneurs or other highly online hustlers) — are helping to fire up demand for custom products like t-shirts, mugs, stickers etc, expanding the market for on-demand printing and shipping.

Printify says it’s now connecting some two million merchants with print providers all over the world — and shipping a million units per month.

It’s also grown to employ close to 500 people — doubling its headcount over the past year, now with a plan to add a further 200 positions by the end of the year.

“Our main audiences are creators, entrepreneurs; most of our merchants are people who want to build a side-business and earn money in addition to their main income, however, we also see a high growth of creators and entrepreneurs who use Printify as a service that helps building their core business,” the startup tells TechCrunch.

It’s one of a number of custom printing startups that have positioned themselves to step in to tackle the printing and shipping piece at scale, often building up businesses over several years from a far smaller base. (Others in the space include Printful, Gelato and Zazzle.)

The 2015-founder Printify has slightly fewer years in the business than some of its rivals but it argues that’s allowed it to be more focused on serving the micro-brand building merchants who are now sparking such a boom in demand custom wares.

“Printify gives the ability for everyone to earn additional income,” it says when asked about the competitive mix — touting a focus on product selection, quality and price as its special sauce, in addition to its marketplace’s global footprint, meaning it can print and ship products to meet demand from merchants all over the world.

“Those are the key aspects our merchants are looking for,” it adds. “Printify provides the largest selection of on-demand printed products for creators and merchants to sell online. Furthermore, Printify provides lowest prices, while ensuring reliable high quality standards.”

The most popular products being sold by merchants using its marketplace are “the classics” — aka T-shirts, hoodies, stickers, mugs, posters and hats.

“We also see a fast-growing market for baby and children’s products, sportswear, pet products and drinkware,” it adds. “Most merchants choose Printify because of our wide selection and geographical flexibility — we have 370+ products in our catalog and adding several each week, printed in 100+ locations all over the world.”

Commenting on the Series A funding in a statement, Dino Becirovic, principal at Index Ventures, said: “Printify is the leading marketplace for on-demand manufacturing, offering the largest selection of products and print providers. They have removed all the barriers to product creation and enabled over 2 million creators to launch successful merchandise businesses at the push of a button. Over time, as more manufacturers come online and more methods become available, Printify will allow any creator to bring their wildest product ideas to reality.”

News: The newest Roomba gets smarter as it vacuums

• September 9, 2021
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The Roomba is easily among the most ubiquitous robots in the world — but it has never been one of the smartest. On the whole, that’s not a major issue. The top-selling vacuum is good at what it does: cleaning floors. But a roboticist’s work is never done; iRobot has turned the vast majority of

The Roomba is easily among the most ubiquitous robots in the world — but it has never been one of the smartest. On the whole, that’s not a major issue. The top-selling vacuum is good at what it does: cleaning floors. But a roboticist’s work is never done; iRobot has turned the vast majority of its attention and resources on the line for good reason, and the company has spent virtually every generation improving the robot’s ability to perform its very specific task.

This time out, that means using on-board sensors to remember areas of the home and layout, along with areas that need a little extra cleaning time.

“We’ve turned on continuous learning, so that if you’ve changed things in your home, Roomba will figure it out,” CEO Colin Angle tells TechCrunch. “If you open a door that you’ve never opened before, the Roomba will go explore it. If you moved a couch, it will understand that the home is a bit different than it used to be, and that’s okay. The information that we’re gathering grows in richness.”

Image Credits: iRobot

The other big piece of that puzzle is identifying and avoiding specific objects. The company says it has worked on identifying hundreds of potential objects, but is starting with two specific problem areas: cords and poop. Both are big potential problem areas for a robotic vacuum system, albeit for dramatically different reasons. In either case, you don’t want to have to get down on your hands and knees and deal with the fallout.

In the case of the former, iRobot made an acronym — and a guarantee. With Pet Owner Official Promise (P.O.O.P.), the company says it will replace any j7+ that runs over animal dookie. (Fine print: Offer valid for 1 year from purchase and covers replacement product only. Available in limited jurisdictions, additional terms and conditions apply.)

“You can Google this and see some not so pleasant examples of robots running over poop,” says iRobot’s director of Product Management, Hooman Shahidi. “We’ve solved this problem with consumers. If we see animal poop, we avoid it and inform the consumers that we saw it.”

Image Credits: iRobot

Angle adds, “The glorious career of roboticists may not have been fully realized when we were sending people home and creating hundreds of models of poo. Sending people around to photograph and create synthetic models of poo. I don’t know how many tens of thousands of images of all different shapes and sizes of synthetic images were required, but this is not demo code, clearly. We can’t do pee. It has to have some 3D aspects to it, but it is something we believe you can count on for the robot to identify and avoid.”

The third piece is scheduling, with the system adapting to a user’s activities. That could mean cleaning while you’re away (using your phone as a trigger for proximity) or making sure it avoids rooms you’re in. If the robot has to traverse the house, it will drive quietly and not start up until it actually begins its job. The system also now offers a clean-time estimate to let the user know how long the job will take.

The j7 is available now in the U.S. and Canada for $649. The j7+, which includes a more compact cleaning base, will run $849. They’re also available in Europe and will be rolling out to additional markets next year. Genius 3.0, meanwhile, will be available as an OTA update for the rest of the company’s connected robots.

News: Sequoia’s Pat Grady says it isn’t clear startups “should be accelerating” right now — here’s why

• September 9, 2021
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Earlier today, we joined friend and former colleague Jon Fortt of CNBC in interviewing partner Pat Grady of Sequoia Capital, and it proved a wide-ranging conversation (we wound up blabbing for an hour, which was not always the plan). You can check out the video below but we thought there were some highlights worth pulling

Earlier today, we joined friend and former colleague Jon Fortt of CNBC in interviewing partner Pat Grady of Sequoia Capital, and it proved a wide-ranging conversation (we wound up blabbing for an hour, which was not always the plan). You can check out the video below but we thought there were some highlights worth pulling out for some of you, including as it pertains to the current market, which has never felt frothier.

It’s more than anecdotal. According to a recent Wilson Sonsini report that we referenced during this chat, during the first quarter of this year, the median pre-money valuation for Series C and later financings hit a record $675 million — more than double the full year 2020 median of $315 million. Meanwhile, senior liquidation preferences in so-called up rounds dropped from appearing in 35% of related deals in 2017 to 20% in the first quarter — a trend that suggests that investors are removing terms in order to win deals. In some cases, founders are feeling so empowered that they are calling out investor behavior that makes them uncomfortable, which is something you didn’t see until more recently.

But Grady said not all is what it seems to those of us on the sidelines. Indeed, he said that while Sequoia’s advice to founders as recently as March of this year was to hit the gas, things have changed more recently. Specifically, he said, “In the last couple of months, a rollout of the vaccines has kind of kind of tapered, so I would say that fog has descended onto the road [and] it’s not so clear the company should be accelerating anymore.”

We also talked about whether companies can forever stay distributed, Tiger Global, and why one of Sequoia’s biggest portfolio companies, the payments giant Stripe, isn’t a public company yet (though it has reportedly hired a law firm to help with preparations). You can find that in the video if you’re so inclined.

On how COVID has impacted Sequoia’s outlook compared with the financial crisis of 2008, when Sequoia famously published its now-famous “RIP: Good Times” memo:

PG: If you go back to that RIP memo, I’d been at Sequoia for a year or so. It was the first major disruption that I had seen —  it was the first major disruption that a lot of our founders had seen. So the question we were getting was, ‘What does this mean for us?’ It was the same sort of thing that happened in March of 2020 that caused us to put out the ‘Black Swan‘ memo [when] what we said was, ‘Hey, you need to brake when you’re going into the curve, so slow down [and] make sure you kind of have your bearings.’

In March of this year what we said was, ‘Okay, now that we’re coming out of the curve, go and accelerate.’ Unfortunately, in the last couple of months, a rollout of the vaccines has kind of kind of tapered and so I would say that fog has descended onto the road [and] it’s not so clear the company should be accelerating anymore. We’re probably in the midst of more indecision now than we were a few months ago or even a year ago . . .we’re kind of stuck in the middle. And so what we’ve been telling companies today is focus on the basics.

On the signals that suggest a slight slowdown to Sequoia, when fundraising all around continues at a record clip:

We don’t pay that much attention to the fundraising numbers, but we do pay attention to employees and we do pay attention to customers, and if you look across not just our portfolio but also public companies in the market at large, attrition has spiked dramatically. There are a lot of people who said, ‘Hey, I hunkered down, I worked hard, I put in my time, but now that the world is starting to open up a little bit again, I’m going to take some time off. I’m going to travel on the see family. I’m going to find a new job. I’m going to start a company.’ And so attrition numbers are actually spiking across the board.

If we look at the customer side of things –and this is not a number that you can get out of public companies because of the way they report [but it’s a number] you can see in private companies — a lot of companies added less revenue in the second quarter than they added in the first. So we actually have seen a little bit of a pullback on the customer side of things [and] that hasn’t necessarily shown up in the fundraising numbers.

On whether that pullback is good, bad, or neutral for founders and investors:

The good news is the whole reason startups exist is to solve important problems in the world, and never have we had a broader array of important problems to be solved than we do right now, because both consumer behavior and the way that businesses operate has changed so dramatically in the last 12 or 18 months. So if what I just said sounds like bad news, we actually think that on balance, it’s great news, because we see these jobs opening up in the world that founders are rushing to fill. I think that’s probably why the fundraising numbers are what they are, because everybody sees all those opportunities and they’re eager to jump in.

On what happens when some of these many new opportunities invariably start to converge — given the current pace of startup funding —  and portfolio companies begin to collide, as happened to Sequoia in March of last year:

We have always had a policy that we do not invest in direct competitors. What defines a direct competitor? Two companies who are going after the same customers in the same market at the same moment in time. Now, if we have a company here in the U.S. going out to the US market, and our partners in India or China or Southeast Asia have a company in their market that does something similar for their market, that’s okay, and maybe someday, down the road, they all end up targeting the same sort of customers. But as long as they’re distinct markets at time zero and they don’t look like they’re converging, that’s okay.

When we’ve ended up in companies that had conflicts, either we’ve done the right thing as in the situation you referenced, or when two companies have kind of converged over time, we’ve set up information barriers and done our best to act in good faith.

So conflicts, it is tough.

There are two products in this market. There’s a product that is faster and cheaper money. And then there’s a product that is unfair advantage. The unfair advantage could be nothing more than that Sequoia doesn’t invest in a lot of companies. We don’t invest in a new company every day. We might partner with 15 to 20 new founders in any given year, and there’s some information value in the fact that Sequoia has gotten into business with a company. So if your unfair advantage is nothing more than the fact that Sequoia chose you, so to speak, that’s still a pretty good advantage when it comes to landing customers [and] landing employees. If your product is money, feel free to give it to competitive companies, because they’re going to get money from somewhere anyway.

News: Rocket Lab’s order backlog tops $141M as the company inks five-launch deal with Kinéis

• September 8, 2021
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It was a busy first half of the year for U.S.-New Zealand company Rocket Lab, which posted earnings for the first six months of 2021 on Wednesday – the first such reporting since the company went public last month. Rocket Lab reported revenues for the six-month period of $29.5 million. Its order backlog also grew

It was a busy first half of the year for U.S.-New Zealand company Rocket Lab, which posted earnings for the first six months of 2021 on Wednesday – the first such reporting since the company went public last month.

Rocket Lab reported revenues for the six-month period of $29.5 million. Its order backlog also grew to $141.4 million as of June 30, up 136% from $59.9 million compared to the same period last year.

While the general trend seems to be positive, executives emphasized the continued impact of COVID-19 restrictions in New Zealand, the site of one of the company’s key launch facilities. CFO Adam Spice said the third quarter has already been impacted by the pandemic, after New Zealand introduced strict lockdown restrictions in response to an 855-person outbreak of the Delta variant. Those restrictions resulted in “no further launch activity planned” for the quarter, Spice said, and will likely result in a $10-15 million impact on revenues for the year.

Despite these setbacks, executives said they anticipated a yearly revenue of $50-54 million. GAAP operating expenses, meanwhile, hit $29.3 million for the six-month period, up from $11.9 million for the first half of last year. The majority of that increase was from R&D spending, including the development of an automated flight termination system and the Neutron launch vehicle, Spice added.

Rocket Lab, which started as a launch company, has significantly branched out since its founding in 2006. The company now fashions itself as an end-to-end space company, providing launch services, as well as the design, manufacturing and operation of spacecraft.

It is this latter business area that Rocket Lab has aggressively grown over the past eighteen months; some recent milestones include an agreement to develop three of Rocket Lab’s Photon spacecraft for space manufacturing company Varda Space Industries and plans to send two Photons to Mars on an upcoming space mission. The growth of its space systems division reflects these developments; for the six-month period, space systems made up a $5.4 million share of revenue, up from just $300,000 in the same quarter last year.

Rocket Lab also said it would start manufacturing satellite components at scale by the end of this year, starting with reaction wheels, a critical attitude and stability control system. Rocket Lab will be opening a new facility that will be capable of producing up to 2,000 reaction wheels annually, a massive increase in volumes compared to what’s ever been available to the space industry before.

“Satellite components typically have been produced in small numbers which has really limited the speed and scale of constellation development,” CEO Peter Beck said during an investor call Wednesday. “The [reaction wheel production] line has been built to solve that, enabling production at scale to meet the growing needs of customers in the industry at large.”

Rocket Lab’s space systems division was given a huge boost by the acquisition of major satellite hardware manufacturer Sinclair Interplanetary last year, and it likely won’t be the company’s last purchase. Rocket Lab has around a half dozen deals it’s actively investigating, Spice told investors Wednesday. “The Sinclair acquisition has really emboldened us to lean forward and look at opportunities.”

“What’s interesting about this market right now is it does really feel like it’s ripe for consolidation,” he said. “Not consolidation in the sense of large companies necessarily getting together but the fact [that] the invest-ability of space is a relatively new phenomenon,” he said.

Company executives stayed largely mum on the Neutron rocket, with Beck simply noting that it “continues to develop really well” and that the company will provide a more detailed development in the coming months.

“Neutron is a vehicle that is not an increment on Electron,” he said. “It is something that really sets a new standard within the space industry.”

Rocket Lab also announced today that it has inked a multi-launch contract with Kinéis, a French connectivity provider for Internet of Things devices, to deploy its satellite constellation across five Electron missions. Kinéis’ investors include the French space agency Centre National d’Études Spatiales and French space company Collecte Localisation Satellites.

The constellation will consist of 25 satellites in total, adding to the over 100 satellites Rocket Lab has launched on its Electron rocket to date. The launches are scheduled for the second quarter 2023.

Five Electron launches, 25 satellites, 1 entire constellation: we’ve signed a deal with @KineisIoT to deliver their internet-of-things constellation to space on Electron. pic.twitter.com/8UtjGQS0gm

— Rocket Lab (@RocketLab) September 8, 2021

This is just the latest multi-launch deal Rocket Lab has inked in recent months, including a contract with satellite analytics company BlackSky for five launches.

Rocket Lab has continued to rise, closing Wednesday at $15.09. That represents a nearly 50% increase since the company’s public debut at the end of August.

News: The 4 things needed to reach Biden’s ambitious 2050 solar goal

• September 8, 2021
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A report on the future of solar energy from the Department of Energy paints a sunny picture, if you will, of the next three decades, at the end of which nearly half the country’s energy will be provided by the sun. But for that to happen, big pushes need to happen along four major lines:

A report on the future of solar energy from the Department of Energy paints a sunny picture, if you will, of the next three decades, at the end of which nearly half the country’s energy will be provided by the sun. But for that to happen, big pushes need to happen along four major lines: better photovoltaics, more energy storage, lower soft costs, and putting about a million people to work.

Here’s what the report says needs to happen in each of these sectors in order to meet the ambitious goals it sets out.

Better photovoltaics

The solar cells themselves will need to continue to improve in both cost and efficiency in order to achieve the kind of installation volumes hoped for by the DOE. For reference, 2020 saw 15 gigawatts worth of solar installed, the most ever — but we’re going to need to double that installation rate by 2025, then double it again by 2030.

If photovoltaics don’t improve in efficiency, that means these already ambitious numbers need to go even higher to account for that. And if they stay at today’s prices, the costs will be too high to achieve those volumes as well.

Photovoltaics have come a long way, but they also have a long way to go.

Fortunately efficiency is going up and cost is going down already. But it’s not like that just happens naturally. Companies and researchers across the globe have spent millions on new manufacturing processes, new materials, and other improvements, incremental individually but which add up over time. This basic research and advancement of the science and methods around solar must continue at or beyond the pace that they have over the last two decades.

The DOE suggests that research along the lines of making more exotic PVs cheaper, or stacking cells to minimize bandgap-related losses could be crucial. Flexible and tile- or shingle-like substrates or semi-transparent installations that pass light through to crops or building interiors may also figure. Altogether the plan calls for a reduction of the overall cost to drop by almost half from $1.30/watt today on average to $0.70 by 2030 and more after that.

Solar concentrators get their own heading in the report, and many companies are looking into these to replace industrial processes. These will not likely be used to support the grid at large but will nevertheless replace many fossil fuel based processes.

More energy storage

An unavoidable consequence of getting your energy from the sun is that at night you must rely on stored energy in some form or another, originally nuclear or coal but increasingly a form of storage that collects excess power collected during the daytime. With more of peak usage being covered by renewables, cities can safely transition away from carbon-based energy sources.

While we often think of energy storage in terms of batteries, and certainly they will be present, but the amount of energy that must be stored rules out something like lithium-ion batteries as the primary storage mechanism. Instead, the excess energy can be put towards powering energy-hungry renewable fuel production, like hydrogen fuel cells. This fuel can then be used to generate power when solar can’t meet demand.

The diagram shows how demand would normally go (purple) then how it would go with solar (orange) and how energy storage could mitigate that load (solid colors).

That’s just the “off the top of the head” answer. As the report states: “Thermal, chemical, and mechanical storage technologies are under various stages of development, including pumped thermal storage, liquid air energy storage, novel gravity-based technologies, and geological hydrogen storage.”

No doubt there will be a variety of new and old technologies working to provide the various levels of energy redundancy and storage duration needs of the country. These will go a long way towards making solar and other renewable energy sources capable of being relied on for a greater proportion of demand.

Lower soft costs

If we’re going to double and redouble the rate of solar cell deployment, the costs have to come down not just for the cells themselves, but the whole end-to-end process: assessment, accounting, labor, and of course the profit due to the companies that will be doing the actual work.

Lowering non-hardware costs is already the goal of many startups, like Aurora Solar, which clearly saw the writing on the wall and started making it as easy as possible to plan, visualize, and sell solar installations entirely online.

Right now the all-in cost of a solar roof might be twice the cost of the hardware or more. There are several contributors to this, from financing to regulations to markets, and each has its own intricacies beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that if you can shave one percent off the cost of a solar installation by streamlining the time or cost involved in any of these areas, there will be more than enough volume to turn that one point into a major sum. It will take the combined efforts of many organizational and commercial minds to make this happen, just as it takes the efforts of many scientific ones to improve PVs.

A million jobs

Last but certainly not least, someone has to actually do all this work. That means a whole lot of labor — several times the quarter million people currently estimated to be attached to the solar industry in the country today.

Image Credits: Will Lester/Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Jobs in this sector will run the gamut, from skilled workers with construction experience to energy professionals who’ve managed grids to public-private partnership wizards who connect commerce to the government’s inevitable top-down incentives. The additional half a million to a million jobs will almost certainly comprise many brand new companies and sub-industries, but the general breakdown so far has been about 65 percent installation and project development, 25 percent sales and manufacturing, and the rest in miscellaneous roles.

It is worth noting, however, that energy concerns currently clinging with white knuckles to aging oil and coal infrastructure will need to do right by the tens of thousands they still employ, and the renewable energy sector is a perfect transition space. “Throughout the transition, certain fossil fuel companies may come under increasing financial distress,” the report reads, which is something of an understatement. The authors strongly suggest funding transition programs that cover training, relocation, and guarantees of existing financial benefits like pensions.

The report points out that the solar industry is overwhelmingly white and male, like a few others we could name, so it is probably worth putting in work on that front if the million hires are to be at all equitable.

You can browse the full study here.

News: Daily Crunch: Google rolls out new Workspace features for all users

• September 8, 2021
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Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hi friends!

Welcome to the Daily Crunch for Wednesday, September 8, 2021. Alex is still out, so I’ll be steering this ship for a few more days while (I hope) he stares at trees, or the ocean, or really anything but words on a computer screen. Alex, if you’re reading this, please put your phone in airplane mode and do something cool. — Greg

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Wright tests its electric engine for passenger planes: Electric planes face challenges that electric cars don’t, like … you know, needing to get off the ground. Current battery tech is just too heavy for existing engines to get up in the air efficiently. Devin Coldewey has a profile on Wright, a startup looking to tackle this by making an electric engine that produces more thrust from less energy. They’re currently testing it at sea level, with plans to get it up to flying heights sometime next year.
• Howard University cancels classes after ransomware attack: “Sorry class, lessons are canceled for the day because we got hacked.” It’s the oh-so-2021 version of a snow day. Snow Crash Day?
• SEC threatens to sue Coinbase: Looks like there’s a bit of a battle potentially brewing between Coinbase and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Coinbase wants to launch a service that would let users loan out crypto assets to a lending pool and gain interest (noting that others already have launched similar services). Coinbase gave the SEC a heads-up … which, according to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, led to the SEC threatening to sue Coinbase if it moved forward.

Startups/VC

• The credit card with a $27 limit: “The relatively young credit-rating system in India covers only a tiny fraction of the nation’s population,” writes Manish Singh. As a result, an equally tiny fraction of the population has access to credit cards. Slice, a startup out of Bangalore, is looking to help young people in the region start to slowly build their credit by introducing a card with a cap of 2,000 Indian rupees — or about $27.
• A social network for making music: TikTok remixed the concept of the remix, allowing users to take another user’s video and remold it into their own thing. Mayk.it, a new social app founded by TikTok/Snap alums, wants to bring the focus back to music. One user makes a beat, others add vocals and everyone crosses their fingers for a hit. The app launched this week, simultaneously announcing it had raised $4 million in seed funding.
• PayPal buys Paidy: $2.7 billion! That’s how much PayPal is dropping on Paidy, a popular buy now, pay later service from Japan. Kate Park writes that this move should help PayPal dive right into deferred payments in the country — which, as she points out, is the third largest e-commerce market in the world.

Debt versus equity: When do non-traditional funding strategies make sense?

Many potential founders are well versed in startup economics — and many are completely green.

When it comes to raising funds, understanding the relative benefits (and limitations) of debt and equity financing is required knowledge, however.

Founders who are less willing to dilute their control may be willing to use debt financing to fund their capital expenditures, “but it doesn’t make sense for everyone,” says six-time entrepreneur David Friend.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• Microsoft launches a personalized news service: Microsoft is taking a swing at the Apple News/Flipboard concept with Microsoft Start, a site/app that aggregates content from your favorite news sources. You can thumbs up/down things to tune the algorithm over time, because what the world needs is more robots telling us what to read. I miss Google Reader.
• Google opens Spaces for all: Last year Google rebranded its built-for-work toolset from G Suite to Google Workspace. Around the same time, it started testing new features that makes the myriad Workspace tools (Gmail, Docs, Meet, etc.) work more cohesively, retuning them with the sudden work-from-home spike in mind. As of today, those features are rolling out to everyone.
• Twitter is testing big ol’ full-width photos and videos: “While the result looks like a win to us, any change to Twitter’s design is likely to inspire a vocal subset of users to hate-tweet about it for a day or so before forgetting the changes altogether,” Taylor Hatmaker so perfectly sums up.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

TechCrunch wants to help startups find the right expert for their needs. To do this, we’re building a shortlist of the top growth marketers. We’ve received great recommendations for growth marketers in the startup industry since we launched our survey.

We’re excited to read more responses as they come in! Fill out the survey here.

Our editorial coverage about growth marketing includes articles from the TechCrunch team, guest columns, and posts like “Use cohort analysis to drive smarter startup growth” by Jonathan Metrick on Extra Crunch.

News: Tape It launches an AI-powered music recording app for iPhone

• September 8, 2021
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Earlier this year, Apple officially discontinued Music Memos, an iPhone app that allowed musicians to quickly record audio and develop new song ideas. Now, a new startup called Tape It is stepping in to fill the void with an app that improves audio recordings by offering a variety of features, including higher-quality sound, automatic instrument

Earlier this year, Apple officially discontinued Music Memos, an iPhone app that allowed musicians to quickly record audio and develop new song ideas. Now, a new startup called Tape It is stepping in to fill the void with an app that improves audio recordings by offering a variety of features, including higher-quality sound, automatic instrument detection, support for markers, notes and images, and more.

The idea for Tape It comes from two friends and musicians, Thomas Walther and Jan Nash.

Walther had previously spent three and a half years at Spotify, following its 2017 acquisition of the audio detection startup Sonalytic, which he had co-founded. Nash, meanwhile, is a classically trained opera singer, who also plays bass and is an engineer.

They’re joined by designer and musician Christian Crusius, previously of the design consultancy Fjord, which was acquired by Accenture.

The founders, who had played in a band together for many years, were inspired to build Tape It because it was something they wanted for themselves, Walther says. After ending his stint at Spotify working in their new Soundtrap division (an online music startup Spotify also bought in 2017), he knew he wanted to work on a project that was more focused on the music-making side of things. But while Soundtrap worked for some, it wasn’t what either Walther or his friends had needed. Instead, they wanted a simple tool that would allow them to record their music with their phone — something that musicians often do today using Apple’s Voice Memos app and, briefly, Music Memos — until its demise.

Image Credits: Tape It

“Regardless of whether you’re an amateur or even like a touring professional…you will record your ideas with your phone, just because that’s what you have with you,” Walther explains. “It’s the exact same thing with cameras — the best camera is the one you have with you. And the best audio recording tool is the one you have with you.”

That is, when you want to record, the easiest thing to do is not to get out your laptop and connect a bunch of cables to it, then load up your studio software — it’s to hit the record button on your iPhone.

The Tape It app allows you to do just that, but adds other features that make it more competitive with its built-in competition, Voice Memos.

When you record using Tape It, the app leverages AI to automatically detect the instrument, then annotate the recording with a visual indication to make those recordings easier to find by looking for the colorful icon. Musicians can also add their own markers to the files right when they record them, then add notes and photos to remind themselves of other details. This can be useful when reviewing the recordings later on, Walther says.

Image Credits: Tape It

“If I have a nice guitar sound, I can just take a picture of the settings on my amplifier, and I have them. This is something musicians do all the time,” he notes. “It’s the easiest way to re-create that sound.”

Another novel, but simple, change in Tape It is it that breaks longer recordings into multiple lines, similar to a paragraph of text. The team calls this the “Time Paragraph,” and believes it will make listening to longer sessions easier than the default — which is typically a single, horizontally scrollable recording.

Image Credits: Tape It

The app has also been designed so it’s easier to go back to the right part of recordings, thanks to its smart waveforms, in addition to the optional markers and photos. And you can mark recordings as favorites so you can quickly pull up a list of your best ideas and sounds. The app offers full media center integration as well, so you can play back your music whenever you have time.

However, the standout feature is Tape It’s support for “Stereo HD” quality. Here, the app takes advantage of the two microphones on devices like the iPhone XS, XR, and other newer models, then improves the sound using AI technology and other noise reduction techniques, which it’s developed in-house. This feature is part of its $20 per year premium subscription.

Over time, Tape It intends to broaden its use of AI and other IP to improve the sound quality further. It also plans to introduce collaborative features and support for importing and exporting recordings into professional studio software. This could eventually place Tape It into the same market that SoundCloud had initially chased before it shifted its focus to becoming more of a consumer-facing service.

But first, Tape It wants to nail the single-user workflow before adding on more sharing features.

“We decided that it’s so important to make sure it’s useful, even just for you. The stuff that you can collaborate on — if you don’t like using it yourself, you’re not going to use it,” Walther says.

Tape It’s team of three is based in Stockholm and Berlin and is currently bootstrapping.

The app itself is a free download on iOS and will later support desktop users on Mac and Windows. An Android version is not planned.

News: AI-driven voice assistant PolyAI raises $14M round led by Khosla Ventures

• September 8, 2021
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“Conversational AI” startup PolyAI, based out of London, has raised $14 million in a funding round led by Silicon Valley’s Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investors (Point72 Ventures, Amadeus Capital, Sands Capital Ventures, Passion Capital and Entrepreneur First). This follows their $12m Series A, and will provide resources for further US expansion beyond its

“Conversational AI” startup PolyAI, based out of London, has raised $14 million in a funding round led by Silicon Valley’s Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investors (Point72 Ventures, Amadeus Capital, Sands Capital Ventures, Passion Capital and Entrepreneur First). This follows their $12m Series A, and will provide resources for further US expansion beyond its existing US team. The startup has now raised $28m to date.

PolyAI builds and deploys voice assistants for automating customer services, which, claims the startup, sound like real humans. This helps companies get an infinite and cheaper supply of their best human voice operators, which reduces customer waiting times, and increases customer satisfaction and retention, says the company.

Co-founder Dr Nikola Mrkšić said: “The technical term for our technology is ‘multi-turn conversational AI’, but all the caller has to do is talk to it, like they would to a human. Compared to existing call centers, our assistants can boost customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores by up to 40% and reduce handling times by up to five minutes.”

“We build these systems very quickly (relative to the competition) — we get experiences like these up and running in 2-4 weeks thanks to our transformer-based language understanding models and the underlying dialog management platform,” he added.

In a statement, Vinod Khosla said: “PolyAI is one of the first AI companies using the newest generation of large pre-trained deep learning models (akin to BERT and GPT-3) in a real-world enterprise product. This means they can deploy automated AI agents in as little as two weeks, where incumbent providers of voice assistants would take up to six months to deploy an older version of this technology.”

A spinout from the University of Cambridge, PolyAI says it is is effectively ’pushing at an open door’ as the pandemic has led to staffing shortages in call centers, driving more companies to deploy smart voice assistants, which appear not to have been replaced chatbots at all, as consumer generally prefer to speak than type.

“We were expecting the system to handle 40% of calls, but at launch it handled 80%, and within two weeks it was up to 87%,” said Brian Jeppesen of Landry’s Golden Nugget Hotels & Casinos. “Callers think the AI agent is human”, Jeppesen continued, “which is great because the voice assistant never has a bad day, and is on 24/7. I wish I could hire more agents like that!”

Competitors include Nuance (recently acquired by Microsoft), IPSoft, Interactions, SmartAction, and Replicant. But PolyAI says its voice assistant can be turned live more quickly, in more languages, and charges on a per-minute basis.

Founded by Nikola Mrkšić (CEO), Tsung-Hsien Wen (CTO), Pei-Hao Su (Engineering Director), the three met while doing PhDs with Professor Steve Young, a leader in spoken dialog systems who pioneered many technologies that underpin voice assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa.

Recent PolyAI clients include Landry’s Entertainment, Greene King, Starling Bank, and Viasat. 

News: Reid Hoffman’s latest book gives us 10 ways to rethink entrepreneurship

• September 8, 2021
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When you’re in the mood for a pep talk, who better to turn to than a well-networked, optimistic mentor who is naturally in your corner? That friendly shoulder is the role that “Masters of Scale” wants to play. Inspired by LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman’s hit podcast, the new book, co-authored by Hoffman

When you’re in the mood for a pep talk, who better to turn to than a well-networked, optimistic mentor who is naturally in your corner? That friendly shoulder is the role that “Masters of Scale” wants to play.

Inspired by LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman’s hit podcast, the new book, co-authored by Hoffman along with podcast executive producers June Cohen and Deron Triff, came out this week. Riddled with anecdotes and actionable takeaways, the book’s strength is wholly related to the sheer diversity of entrepreneurs that are represented in the text. Beyond sticking to tech leaders, the book draws lessons from Spanx founder Sara Blakely, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz and Union Square Hospitality Group CEO Daniel Meyer. Like any good mentor, the book is realistic. Mentors know you aren’t Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd or Airbnb’s Brian Chesky yet, but can extract universally applicable lessons from those leaders so that you can relate to them.

While press wasn’t a main character in the book, “Master of Scale” has already changed my perspective on how I interview founders. Lessons from Tristan Walker made me want to ask more questions about founders, and their most controversial beliefs, rather than how they plan to spend their new round of funding. A note from Andrés Ruzo made me realize that a startup that makes too much sense might be a comfortable read, but it might not be a moonshot that disrupts the world; in other words, pursue the startups that have too much seemingly foolish ambition — because they may be where the best strides, and stories, are made. Finally, it confirmed my belief that the best litmus test for a founder is if they are willing to talk about the hardships ahead of them in an honest, humble way.

Through every feel-good story, I waited for the pandemic to be addressed. The pandemic’s impact on startup advice was largely isolated to a single chapter about the art of the pivot. Instead of interspersing advice on how to deal with the pandemic’s impact on venture capital, funding and markets more broadly, the book limited its references to the cataclysmic event. This choice keeps the advice smartly evergreen. That said, I felt like the book’s choice to not talk much about the ugly within startupland creates an imbalance of sorts. It would have benefitted from talking directly about divisive dynamics, ranging from how WeWork’s Adam Neumann impacted the way we talk about visionary founders, Brian Armstrong’s Coinbase memo and what it means for startup culture, or even the role of the tech press today. One could argue that the book never claims to be journalistic, and instead wanted to play the role of a cheerleading mentor, not a cynical one.

Writing a book based on a hit podcast isn’t necessarily a walk in the park. Audio is an entirely different medium from written text, and it takes a certain finesse to translate into text the charisma and humility of vocal banter. Hoffman and the authors thus certainly shine brighter in some stories than others, leaning heavily on a repeated, yet effective storytelling arc throughout the text: introduce problem, present aha moment, offer solutions and share universal lessons.

I read the book over a weekend; I recommend the same move for any aspiring entrepreneur, techie or startup journalist looking to pick up a copy. Reid and the coauthors will do a fantastic job connecting the dots of over 70 entrepreneurs for you, but the real magic will come from what happens when you pause in between the stories — either to Google a founder you resonate with, to change up your interview style or to finally start working on the idea you one day may just blitzscale.