Peer-to-peer car-sharing company Getaround is laying off 10% of staff starting Thursday. The layoffs are part of a restructure aimed to put Getaround on the path to “sustainable profitability and long-term growth,” the company said in a statement.

Per LinkedIn, Getaround has 421 employees, so the staff cuts should affect around 42 employees. Getaround did not respond in time to TechCrunch to confirm the number of laid-off employees, nor which teams will be most affected.

The news comes a day after Getaround received a delisting warning from the New York Stock Exchange because its stock price has been trading too low. Following the company’s announcement, shares of Getaround spiked 17% after hours from $0.64 at market close to $0.75, but have since settled to around $0.65, which is still a 2.19% increase today.

Getaround, which joined the public markets in December via a merger with InterPrivate II Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), said it would also significantly reduce other operating expenses like the company’s contract workforce and outside professional services.

Like almost every other executive over the past year who has ordered layoffs, Sam Zaid, Getaround’s CEO, said the restructuring plan is a response to “an uncertain near-term macroeconomic outlook, which has hit technology companies particularly hard.”

Getaround expects the restructuring to result in cost savings of between $25 million and $30 million on an annualized run-rate basis.

It’s not yet clear how the company’s decision to go public through a SPAC merger has affected its balance sheets. The deal was finalized in the fourth quarter of 2022, and Getaround has yet to set a date for its earnings release. Regulatory filings show Getaround’s cash burn in the first nine months of 2022 was $63.2 million. The company reported $45 million in revenue for the same period, which is a decrease from $48 million the year prior. By the end of Q3, Getaround had $27.2 million in cash to play around with.

The merger would have brought the company another $228 million of gross proceeds to stay in operation and achieve its next phase of growth.

Car-sharing SPAC Getaround lays off 10% of staff by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

Apple has thus far been lauded for a deliberate hiring approach that saved the company from the mass layoffs conducted by top competitors like Alphabet and Amazon. But not even the iPhone maker is immune from economic headwinds. In quarterly earnings posted today, the company notched its first year-over-year loss since prior to the pandemic.

The company’s quarterly revenue, for the quarter ending December 31, 2022, was $117.2 billion, down 5 percent year over year, according to a release tied to the news. 

CEO Tim Cook attempted to accentuate the positive in the earnings report. “As we all continue to navigate a challenging environment, we are proud to have our best lineup of products and services ever, and as always, we remain focused on the long term and are leading with our values in everything we do,” Cook wrote.

The executive opened up a bit more in an interview with CNBC, noting a trio of key headwinds, including iPhone production issues in China, the broader economic climate and the strength of the U.S. dollar. He noted that Apple, much like the rest of the world, will be making strategic cutbacks. “We’re also recognizing the environment that we’re in is tough,” Cook added. “And so we’re cutting costs. We’re cutting hiring, we’re being very prudent and deliberate on people that we hire.”

After enjoying boosted hardware sales over the pandemic as people restructured their professional and school lives during a relative economic boom time, the company is now seeing that sales activity fall off. The last quarter represented the biggest drop in quarterly revenue for the company since 2016.

Mac and iPad revenue dropped nearly 30% each from the previous year, while revenue for the iPhone was down 8%. Supply chain and manufacturing issues have created a major bottleneck for the handset in recent year. Meanwhile, a new wave of lockdowns in China exacerbated issues during what is traditionally the company’s most profitable time of year. Apple says it is now comfortable with iPhone production levels.

Last month the company announced that Cook would receive a nearly 50% pay cut for the year, pulling in a mere $49 million annual salary.

With Cook’s latest comments around strategic cutbacks, matched with what we now know about company’s financial performance, it’s fair to wonder if workforce reductions are coming for the company. What we do know is just how hard the macroeconomic environment has been on the hardware giant — which, per its latest milestone, has more than 2 billion active devices in its installed base.

Apple stock drops on rare Q4 earnings miss by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

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On the one hand, we could be upset that Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, but the sun hasn’t come out where Christine lives for several days, so she’s pretty stoked that wherever Phil lives has a ray of sunshine or two. In other news, Haje has to move house due to a flooded apartment, weather is real, and perhaps it’s time we start taking climate change seriously, y’all.

Meanwhile, for today’s Black History Month recommendation, we’re watching Angela Davis talking about how we can’t eradicate racism without eradicating racial capitalism.  — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

• The List: Ron has been following the Salesforce layoffs announced last month and writes that although these were announced in January, some employees are just now finding out they are on the list. Ouch.
• Grocery store going digital…currency that is: Reliance Retail, India’s largest retail chain, is now accepting payments in digital rupees, known as Central Bank Digital Currency, Manish reports.
• The password is…: Dashlane, a password management company, published its source code to GitHub, which Paul writes is one of the first steps the company is taking to provide transparency about its platform.

Startups and VC

Lex, the hookup and social app that launched in 2019 with a nod to lesbian personal ads from the ’80s, is changing. Only, precisely how much will change is still an open question, Harri writes. Sure, the venture-backed startup behind the queer app gave it a new lick of paint last week, but in refocusing on “friends and community,” some users fear that Lex will also scrub away its beloved raunchy essence. “Keep Lex filthy,” the users are chanting.

The growing ease with which anyone can create convincing audio in someone else’s voice has a lot of people on edge, and rightly so, Devin writes. Resemble AI’s proposal for watermarking generated speech may not fix it in one go, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Here’s another bucket o’ stories for your reading joy:

• Pass the crayons: Ingrid reports that open source platform for designers and their coders Penpot draws up $12 million as its user count crosses the 250,000 mark.
• There’s something fishy about this: Christine writes that New School Foods’ filet looks and tastes like salmon, but it’s actually plants.
• Whale, whale, whale: Frederic reports that Triple Whale raises $25 million for its Shopify data platform.
• Don’t worry, bee happy: As the bee population declines, BloomX secures $8 million to apply AI and EVs to pollination, Mike reports.
• Bank grows horn: UK neobank Zopa just raised $93 million at a $1 billion+ valuation, Ingrid reports.

Optimizing freemium products: Challenges and opportunities

Image Credits: Richard 0rury (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Offering a free sample in the hopes that the recipient becomes a paying customer is a core tactic at food courts, cosmetic counters, and inside software startups.

Freemium products are everywhere, but unless companies revisit and optimize their strategy, there’s no effective way to optimize conversions.

“Enabling freemium, especially for established products, can bring organizational and operational challenges even if it adds value to the business,” writes Konstantin Valiotti, product director of growth at PandaDoc.

In this article, he presents strategies for optimizing:

• User activation
• Conversion paths
• Product changes
• Where to place barriers and limitations

Three more from the TC+ team:

• Tearing into language learning: Pitch Deck Teardown: Laoshi’s $570K angel deck, by Haje.
• Gotta get pumped: Want to buy an EV or heat pump? New coin will help you defray the costs, by Tim.
• Hardware is hard? Well, then build it more like you make software: How Fictiv is making hardware manufacturing more like building software, by Haje.

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

Samsung, Google and Qualcomm are poised to take us in and out of reality, Ivan writes. The trio is making a mixed-reality platform that Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon described as “a new era of highly immersive digital experiences that blur the line between our physical and digital worlds. With our Snapdragon XR tech, Samsung’s amazing products, and Google experiences, we have the foundation to make this opportunity a reality.”

As a follow-up to his Apple HomePod review, Brian spoke to the company’s hardware VP, Matthew Costello, to discuss Apple’s approach of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

There’s going to be six more weeks of winter, so how about six more stories?

• It’s a trap!: Financial software firm Ion Group confirmed a ransomware attack that affected some of its trading and derivatives systems, Carly reports.
• That ad might be illegal: If members of the European Parliament get their way, political ads may face tougher targeting restrictions, Natasha L writes.
• All for You: TikTok has some new features, including a new system for enforcing post violations, and the test of a new one for the “For You” feed, Sarah reports.
• We’ve got your ticket to ride an e-scooter: Lyft wants to reshape shared micromobility with dockable e-scooter. Rebecca has more.
• Picture it, layoffs: Pinterest lays off another 150 people as a part of its “long-term strategy,” Ivan writes.
• Taking off: China’s EV upstart Xpeng got the green light to launch its electric vehicle takeoff and landing vehicle, Rita reports.

Daily Crunch: Hundreds of Salesforce workers laid off in January just discovered they were out of work today by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

There’s no denying that the robotics startup world has taken a hit during the ongoing economic downturn. Recent numbers prove what we’ve all suspected for some time. But two things are true: 1) The lull is temporary; and 2) While robotics isn’t recession-proof, construction might as well be.

This is certainly a theme of late — as other categories of robotics have struggled to raise, those operating in construction appear relatively unimpacted. New York-based Toggle this morning announced that it has added another $3 million to its coffers as part of a “Series A Extension.” The initial $8 million Series A was announced back in 2021. Japanese firm Tokyu Construction is a first-time investor in the startup, whose total raise is currently at $15 million.

Image Credits: Toggle

Toggle CEO Daniel Blank tells TechCrunch:

With a renewed interest in American manufacturing and production capacity and the investments pouring into infrastructure and renewable energy in particular (but also batteries and microchips manufacturing), we have been successful at navigating the difficulties whether due to our category, a slowing economy or the pandemic. In this round, adding strategic investors, we’ve demonstrated that the problem of labor cost, availability and speed is really at the forefront for construction firms and they are going directly to the tech startups rather than through VCs to access solutions.

Toggle makes robots that bend rebar, the steel skeletal reinforcement you find in all manner of heavy construction. The company’s headcount is currently at 40, which the company plans to double over the course of the next year, following an upcoming Series B raise. Those roles will primarily be focused on engineering and operations.

Blank notes that the pandemic has contributed to an increased interest in automating difficult and expensive pieces of the construction process.

Image Credits: Toggle

“The pandemic has had a significant impact on the construction industry, leading to increased costs and complexity. Supply chain disruptions, inflation, and rising labor costs have all played a role,” he explains. “To combat these challenges, there has been a growing interest in the adoption of robotics in construction. This trend is consistent across different segments of the industry, as owners and contractors seek ways to save time and money. Robotics and automation, similar to those used in manufacturing, are seen as a solution. This has also led to an acceleration in the use of prefab and modular construction methods.”

In addition to hiring, the new funds will be used to ramp up its robotic production.

Rebar robotics firm Toggle adds another $3M to its fundraising tally by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

Ford reported Thursday it earned $10.4 billion in net income last year, falling well below its own guidance and missing Wall Street’s expectations as the U.S. automaker struggled with supply chain issues and production instability that drove down sales and pushed operating costs higher.

Shares fell as much as 8.3% in after-market trading, before recovering. Ford shares are $13.56, down 5.3% in after-market trading.

Ford CEO Jim Farley said that many of its misses were in the company’s control.

“We should have done much better last year,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a statement. “We left about $2 billion in profits on the table that were within our control, and we’re going to correct that with improved execution and performance.”

Farley emphasized his optimism for Ford, noting that the company has been reorganized into three business units: Ford Blue for gas and hybrid vehicles, Ford Model e for connected EVs and Ford Pro for its commercial products. Farley said 2023 would be pivotal for the automaker.

Breakdown of the numbers

Ford generated $44 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2022, up from the $37.7 billion in revenue it reported in the same period last year. For the full-year, Ford reported $158.1 billion in revenue compared to the $136.3 billion in revenue it generated in 2021.

Ford’s net income was $1.3 billion for the fourth quarter and a net loss of $2 billion for the year. On an adjusted earnings basis, Ford earned $2.6 billion in the fourth quarter and $10.4 billion for all of 2022. Ford’s net income on an adjusted earnings before interest and taxes in 2021 was $10 billion.

Ford had issued guidance that it would earn full-year guidance of adjusted earnings basis between $11.5 billion and $12.5 billion. That’s a miss of $1.1 billion for the year.

Ford said operating cash flow for the year was $6.9 billion and full-year adjusted free cash flow was $9.1 billion. The company reported that as of the end of 2022, it had $32 billion in cash on hand.

Ford left ‘$2B of profits on the table’ in 2022 by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

The hackers who reportedly hit more than 130 organizations last year and stole the credentials of almost 10,000 employees are still targeting several tech and video game companies, according to a report obtained by TechCrunch.

The report, prepared by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, calls the hackers “Scattered Spider.” In a previous publicly available report, the company said this group is also known as “Roasted 0ktapus” in an apparent reference to the report published by Group-IB, another cybersecurity firm, last year.

Reports like the one obtained by TechCrunch are prepared by threat intelligence companies for their customers, with the idea of alerting them to hackers who are either targeting the customers directly, or other companies in the same sector. In the report, CrowdStrike notes that it has limited visibility into the hacking campaign given that it has no “additional forensic artifacts,” referring to data it obtained directly from targeted organizations. That’s why the company admits it has “low confidence” in its assessment that this is activity by Scattered Spider.

Two cybersecurity insiders, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to speak to the press, said that the understanding within the industry is that Scattered Spider is the same group as 0ktapus.

“Scattered Spider continued deploying numerous phishing pages in January 2023. CrowdStrike Intelligence assesses the adversary has likely expanded its target scope to include technology sector companies specializing in gaming or financial software, while maintaining a prior focus on business process outsourcing (BPO) companies and cellular providers,” read the report, which is not publicly available.

It’s unclear if this is the same group that hacked Riot Games last month, but in a list of phishing domains included in the CrowdStrike report, there’s one that was clearly made to target the video game giant given that it includes the name of the company in the URL.

Among the phishing domains, there’s also others tailored to impersonate video game makers Roblox and Zynga; email marketing and newsletter giant Mailchimp and its parent company Intuit; Salesforce; Comcast; and Grubhub. TaskUs, a contractor that provides customer service for companies, including Mailchimp, Intuit and other tech giants, was also on the list.

In January, Mailchimp disclosed that it had been hacked — the second hack against the company in six months. At the time, Mailchimp said the hackers targeted its employees via phishing. It’s unclear if this incident is tied to the activities of Scattered Spider. Mailchimp did not respond to a request for comment.

Riot declined to comment.

Salesforce spokesperson Allen Tsai said that the company is “aware of and monitor phishing campaigns industry-wide.”

“At this time, we have no indication of unauthorized access to customer data relevant to the cited report,” Tsai said in an email.

An Intuit spokesperson did not comment as they had not seen the report.

Roblox, Zynga, TaskUs, Salesforce, Comcast, and Grubhub did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The report said that “the majority” of the hacking group’s phishing pages were designed to mimic Okta login portals, “while a much smaller number impersonated Microsoft.”

CrowdStrike did not respond to a request for comment.

Are you a Google Fi subscriber that was also a victim of a similar attack? Did you also get a personalized notification from the company about the hack against you? We’d love to hear from you. You can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Wickr, Telegram and Wire @lorenzofb, or email lorenzo@techcrunch.com. You can also contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop.

‘0ktapus’ hackers are back and targeting tech and gaming companies, says leaked report by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai originally published on TechCrunch

New references in Instagram’s code suggest the company could be developing a paid verification feature following the rollout of a similar system at Twitter under Elon Musk. Recently discovered code snippets reference explicitly refer to a “paid blue badge” and a new subscription product, a developer has discovered. The same reference also appears in the latest build of the Facebook app, indicating paid verification could be offered across Meta’s platforms if the product continued to be developed.

The discovery was made by developer and reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi, who has previously spotted a number of new Instagram features before they launch, including the in-app scheduling tool that launched in November as well as the newer QR code sharing features. He’s also regularly spotted other internal prototypes, like Instagram’s Candid Challenges, and features in development with Twitter.

Typically, Instagram confirms its smaller tests or prototypes when discovered, but in the case of the paid verification option, the company chose not to comment.

Given Paluzzi’s track record, however, it’s worth at least speculating why Instagram could be weighing a decision around paid verification.

Specifically, Paluzzi shared with TechCrunch screenshots in the app’s code which included lines referencing “IG_NME_PAID_BLUE_BADGE_IDV” and “FB_NME_PAID_BLUE_BADGE_IDV.” He suggested that, given the context, “IDV” could mean identity verification — as that’s also a known meaning for the acronym.

Image Credits: code screenshots from Alessandro Paluzzi (opens in a new window)

In addition, the developer told us he found other references to a new type of subscription product that hadn’t been there previously. The same references were also in one of the latest builds of the Facebook app, he noted.

Still, Paluzzi cautioned that there’s nothing yet visible in the app itself beyond these small code references, so we can only speculate on these findings for the time being.

Still, it’s fun speculation to be had, especially considering the misery that’s today’s Instagram verification system.

The subject of numerous complaints over the years, Instagram’s verification system is obtuse, complicated, and seemingly random, due to its reliance on automation. Although Instagram in 2018 began allowing users to request verification, the overall system itself hasn’t changed much, despite Instagram head Adam Mosseri’s promise that account verification would be a focus of improvement back in 2020.

Currently, the coveted blue badge is still only awarded to high-profile individuals, celebrities, and global brands or entities. But everyday users and smaller creators have long sought similar recognition. That’s led to a multi-million dollar shadow market for verification where people pay thousands of dollars for the blue badges through backchannel means. Last year, in fact, a ProPublica investigation revealed one of the largest Instagram verification schemes to date, which resulted in Meta having to remove illicitly gained badges from hundreds of accounts. In other words, there’s clearly demand for paid verification.

That’s something Elon Musk believes as well, as he quickly made paid verification a key selling point for Twitter’s revamped Twitter Blue subscription. Unfortunately, Twitter’s implementation was not well thought-out, leading to widespread impersonation on the network as users changed their names and profile photos to well-known individuals or brands, which then caused serious mischief. Twitter had to almost immediately pause paid verification and retool, ultimately relaunching with gold badges for businesses and additional verification steps.

Though Twitter’s initial attempts to monetize verification were chaotic, that doesn’t mean the idea itself has no value. Plus, advances in A.I. could help improve the verification process. Already, Instagram uses A.I. in other parts of its app — like finding which accounts belong to kids who lied about their age as well as content recommendations.

In addition, Twitter isn’t the only major social app testing consumer demand for paid subscriptions. Snapchat also caters to its power users with a Snapchat+ subscription that offers a laundry list of perks and extra features. During this week’s earnings call, the company announced it had grown Snapchat+ to over 2 million subscribers in just over half a year’s time.

If it chose, Instagram could offer a subscription bundle to its own power users, which could include a paid blue badge and other features. While it’s not clear at the time that’s what it has in the works, it would be interesting to see such a product come to fruition.

Sarah Perez can be reached at sarahp@techcrunch.com or 415.234.3994 on Signal.  

Is Instagram considering paid verification? Code reveals references to a ‘paid blue badge’ by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Usage-based pricing (UBP) is on the rise — 61% of SaaS companies used this model in some form in 2022, VC firm OpenView found out.

UBP consists of charging based on how the service or product is consumed, not on how many people are using it; that would be the seat-based approach.

But as often in pricing, things are more blurred, and many companies are actually using blended models. Think of Zapier, for example: It offers subscription tiers that include consumption as one of its main variables.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

That blending is one of the key findings of OpenView’s State of Usage-Based Pricing report: “It’s not usage-based or subscription pricing. Today SaaS companies are turning to more complex, hybrid models,” the authors wrote.

Now in its second edition, the firm’s report is based on responses collected between July and August 2022 from private SaaS companies. That was a few months ago, so the data may be lagging a bit, but it still reflects the new spirit in which founders find themselves.

Usage-based pricing is rising, but not replacing other models by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch

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Welcome back to Chain Reaction.

Seems like just yesterday we were ringing in the New Year, but we’ve coasted into February and all seems to be somewhat relaxed (for once) in the crypto world.

Last month was filled with crypto companies laying off staff, developments around the existing and new Chapter 11 bankruptcies in the space, partnerships and conversations about potential recovery in 2023.

Even with a range of bad news flooding the industry, some cryptocurrencies had a bull run in January, amid the market turmoil.

Bitcoin rallied 40% on the month, while ether rose about 32% during the same period. Solana also saw serious recovery, from about $10 in the beginning of the year, near its lowest level since February 2021, up 146% to about $24.3 by the end of January, CoinMarketCap data showed.

These market movements could potentially spark more retail and institutional investors alike to dive in. But whether or not this seemingly random market rally will continue into February is to be determined.

This week in web3

Lost your crypto amid Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings? You’re probably not getting it back (TC+)

As Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings move forward for several big-name crypto companies, those who lost funds are surely hoping to get all — or at least some — of their money back. Lawyers and experts shared their thoughts with TechCrunch on what these cases could mean for creditors and what may happen to those who saw their money disappear overnight.

VC funding to Black web3 founders popped last year, bucking trends (TC+)

Black people who invested in crypto were hit disproportionately hard during the most recent crypto winter, though many Black founders and investors who spoke to TechCrunch remain optimistic about the sector’s potential for the community, and society overall. If anything, last year’s economic correction was necessary, they told TechCrunch. “Bubble had to pop,” People of Crypto co-founder Simone Berry said. “It wasn’t sustainable and economic correction was needed.

Sorare teams up with the Premier League for its NFT fantasy football game

French startup Sorare has signed a four-year licensing partnership with the Premier League. This deal marks an important move for the company as the English football league is one of the most-watched sports leagues in the world. As for sports fans who don’t particularly enjoy soccer (or football as Europeans call it), Sorare also teamed up with the NBA and MLB over the past few months.

Bitcoin-based app Strike expands in Philippines to grow cross-border payment solutions

Strike, a Bitcoin-based payment network and financial app, is expanding to the Philippines to grow cross-border payments and remittance markets. Aside from the Philippines, Strike plans on expanding further in the Latin American and African regions as well due to the “extreme amount of demand,” its CEO Jack Mallers shared. In general, the company’s partnerships and announcement point to its focus on growing the remittance market through its application and other alternative avenues, like Clover.

Enterprise blockchain adoption may grow as hybrid use cases evolve (TC+)

While crypto markets remain volatile, enterprise blockchain adoption is continuing to grow as businesses find new use cases for the technology, according to Daniela Barbosa, executive director of Hyperledger Foundation. One of the biggest demands over the past two years has been “hybrid use cases” and the technology doesn’t just help big companies, but smaller businesses, too, she shared.

The latest pod

ICYMI: For last week’s episode, Jacquelyn talked with Mo Shaikh, co-founder and CEO of the layer-1 blockchain Aptos. Shaikh is a three-time founder with over a decade of experience in financial services as well as blockchain technology and crypto. He also worked on blockchain strategic partnerships for Novi, Facebook’s wallet and was the strategy director at ConsenSys.

“When we’re thinking about Aptos, we certainly thought that the people need a new form of sharing information digitally and being able to share that information and economic value digitally in more efficient, more fair ways,” Shaikh said during the podcast. “That’s the mission that we’re on.”

Last year was huge for Aptos — as the blockchain launched publicly and raised about $400 million in funding, amid a bear market. The new layer-1 got backing from major investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Circle Ventures and the now-defunct FTX Ventures, to name a few. And even though the market is down, its token, APT, rose 380% during the month of January, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Looking forward to 2023, Aptos plans to make it a “year of intention,” Shaikh said. “I think it’s a year of intention for the entire industry.”

We also discussed:

• What it’s like to launch in a bear market
• Builders on the blockchain
• Business development plans for 2023
• Onboarding people not in the space
• The future of interoperability and the multichain world

Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the latest episodes, and please leave us a review if you like what you hear!

Follow the money

1. Haun Ventures leads Sovereign Labs’ $7.4 million seed round to help scale blockchains
2. Crypto security startup Hypernative raised $9 milllion to help prevent web3 cyberattacks
3. BlockJoy raised $12 million to help cut operating costs for businesses running blockchain nodes
4. Web3 marketing startup Addressable raised $7.5 million in a seed round
5. Everscale raised $5 million to help scale blockchains

This list was compiled with information from Messari as well as TechCrunch’s own reporting.

New month, new crypto market moves? by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

A lot has happened in the half-year since we caught up with Ayanna Howard, dean of the Ohio State University’s College of Engineering — not all of it good. The broader economic slowdown has been deeply felt by the robotics industry, across the board, from the smallest startups to the biggest tech giants like Alphabet and Amazon.

Understandably, a lot of the coverage has centered around the impact and companies and those who’ve lost jobs in the process. One key thing we don’t discuss as often are the people currently hunting for jobs — both those who are recently out of one and people who are brand-new to the market.

Catching up with Dean Howard is a perfect opportunity to discuss the latter, both in terms of what the market looks like for recent and soon-to-be grads and what companies can do to recruit and engage folks who are brand-new to the job market. This week, we’re kicking things off with that Q&A, then diving into the first batch of job listings we promised last week and moving on to your regularly scheduled robotics roundup.

Actuator, activate!

Q&A with Dean Ayanna Howard

Ayanna Howard, dean of the Ohio State University’s College of Engineering Image Credits: Logan Wallace / Ohio State University

TC: How are your students feeling about the job market — robotics in particular?

AH: I think there’s a little bit of apprehension, but the fact is there’s still jobs that are open, especially for new hires. When you’re new talent, you’re at a lower rate, obviously. Sometimes you’re more creative and willing to do a little more than what the job is, because you don’t know what the job is.

Prior to the downturn, were students more excited to go into the world of Big Tech or startups?

It was mixed. I really depended on whether they [had a] bachelor’s or a master’s. I found that a lot of students, if they were going to go into the startup world, it would be with a mature startup. It wasn’t one that was just a year or two out. It was one that had at least a Series A. […] Now I think there’s more of a focus on, ‘Let’s go with a large, more established company, just because they’ll last.

Now robotics is something that touches every other category, so there are a lot of robotics jobs to be had outside of strictly robotics companies.

Correct. I consider self-driving cars to be robotics. It’s everything. You have control systems, you have autonomy, you have interaction with people. It’s a classic robotics system that just happens to have a car form factor. Even in that domain, you saw a lot of startups close down, but the large companies have invested a lot more into that and EVs.

What can schools do to train students for the job market?

At Ohio State, we have instituted some programs within the last year around entrepreneurism in startups, around very specific areas. For example, manufacturing, healthcare. Things that we know we’ll always need innovation in. Large companies need that entrepreneurial thinking and mindset, because it allows them to innovate within the company structure. When companies don’t innovate, they tend to be archaic, and when the startup culture comes back up, they’re gonna eat their corn.

As far as your own experience running a startup, how did you determine when to hire a student versus someone more senior?

For the technical talent, it was really new hires. It was because I needed fresh ideas. We needed to know the latest and the greatest, and they would have the education. For marketing and sales, that was much more established. We hired much more seasoned individuals.

What tips would you give for startups hiring recent grads?

Don’t put them on a critical path, starting off, because you might be disappointed if they don’t rise to the challenge. But do give them things that require them to push the boundary conditions. If you hire them for front-end development or graphics, think about things that are tangential that I can push them in so that they can learn. […] You, as a manager, have to be much more strategic, and you have to lay it out.

You do still have to do a little hand-holding. I don’t want to call it “micromanagement,” but you do have to set deliverables, set milestones, and if they don’t meet it, go back and ask them why they didn’t meet it. Not reprimanding, but asking why. Sometimes what you’ll find is they’ll get stuck in certain areas you didn’t anticipate, and then you can push them.

I tend to think generational warfare is silly, but what would you say to those people who suggest that younger millennials and Gen Z are too sensitive or don’t have a work ethic?

I think their motivation is different. The work ethic versus the too sensitive — this generation is passionate about certain things. They are impassionate about others. When you find what they’re passionate about, whatever it is — social impact or design software for underserved communities — you get them there and they will work throughout the night. When we think about work ethic, it’s “You’ve got to show up to work every day.” But if they’re not interested, they can be a little slower or not responsive. It’s a different type of work ethic.

Job Openings

Image Credits: Getty Images / Olga Strelnikova

There’s a sense of helplessness associated with economic downturns. It’s the knowledge that — in the long run — no one’s job is truly safe. The way we’ve structured society means the farther down the ladder you are in regards to money and seniority, the more you’re regarded as being expendable.

For those who’ve been spared, there’s little consolation in a corporation’s pledge to be more scrappy and return to its long-dormant startup roots when you’ve seen so many colleagues suddenly out of work. For those of us who’ve been through that experience, it’s clear that corporate layoffs are indiscriminate when it comes to the individual. When push comes to shove, we all become rounding errors.

I’ve seen a lot of positive feedback on social media reiterating the fact that layoffs aren’t personal. Certainly that’s true for the company doing the laying off, but it’s quite the opposite for the people on the receiving end. Layoffs are deeply personal. They disrupt our lives, our livelihoods, our motivations, our relationships. They contribute to depression and a laundry list of different conditions.

As someone who’s been working in the world of publishing for a long time now, I’ve been on the receiving end a few times. I understand that you can tell someone that something isn’t their fault a million times over, but it can feel like a platitude. Moral support is extremely important during the process — but so are actionable items. Help good people find good jobs. We talk a lot about how work shouldn’t define you, but it takes up more waking hours than anything else. People should be able to find work that is fulfilling and makes them feel valued.

If there’s one thing I’d like you to take away from this, it’s the fact that people are hurting. If you can help, help. Simple, I know, but if you need a less altruistic motivator, understand that the people you help now may well be in a position to help you later.

I’m hoping we can use Actuator as a platform to do just that. As I mentioned previously, each week I’m going to feature a handful of companies in the robotics space that are hiring. I don’t have a timeline for how long we’ll be running this — a lot of that depends on the level of interest among job seekers. The plan for the moment, however, is to keep this going during the current downturn.

I learned a long time ago that hiring is a key reason companies seek out coverage at a place like TechCrunch, and I understand that Actuator’s readers are precisely the sort of people these organizations are looking for. We’re not becoming a job board and won’t post individual positions, but hopefully curating a list will prove useful for job seekers.

If you’d like to be included, shoot me a line with your company’s name and how many positions you’re hiring for (if you don’t include the number, I will attempt to count). And, hey, if you end up landing a new gig based on something you found here, let me know on Twitter. Everyone loves a happy ending.

Robotics Companies That Are Hiring

GrayMatter Robotics (11 openings)
Scythe Robotics (6 openings)
Viam Robotics (10 openings)

Roundup

Image Credits: Amazon

Andy Jassy and a few other C-level folks aside, it seems no one was entirely safe from Amazon’s sweeping job cuts. While it’s been one of the retail behemoth’s main future-proofing focuses of the last decade, Amazon Robotics is reportedly among the divisions impacted by this latest round. CNBC notes that a broad range of roles were targeted in the division, including engineers and product managers. Drone delivery service Prime Air was also disproportionately impacted here.

Image Credits: Boston Dynamics

This week, Boston Dynamics offered some of the first footage of its Stretch robot being put to work at DHL. Stretch, as you’ll recall, is the Hyundai-owned firm’s second commercial robot, following Spot. It’s based on the earlier Handle robot and is designed for exclusively unloading trucks/trailers, conveyor belts and pallets. Companies like DHL are the seemingly perfect target for the product, and fittingly, the logistics giant became one of Boston Dynamics’ first customers, with a $15 million product purchase a year ago last week.

Image Credits: Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST)

Taking us out this week is Raibo, a robot dog recently highlighted in the pages of Science Robotics that’s capable of running on sand at high speeds. Per the paper:

Our model can be parameterized to represent diverse types of terrain from very soft beach sand to hard asphalt. In addition, we introduce an adaptive control architecture that can implicitly identify the terrain properties as the robot feels the terrain. The identified parameters are then used to boost the locomotion performance of the legged robot.

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

And that’s a wrap for this week. To get Actuator in your inbox, sign up here.

There are still robotics jobs to be found (if you know where to look) by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

Most of the pitch deck teardowns to date (here’s a handy list of the more than 30 we have published so far) have been for institutional funding rounds, typically in the millions or tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars raised.

Those are interesting to look at, of course, but I also know that many of you will be much earlier in your journey. I’ve been looking for a good example of an angel deck to share with you, and I found just that in Laoshi‘s angel deck. The company tells me it raised $570,000 at a $5 million cap for its very early-stage language-learning app, explicitly targeted at Chinese tutors and their students.

The deck ain’t fancy, and it isn’t perfect, but the company claims it was successful, so let’s take a look at what it got right — and what could’ve been improved.

We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that. 

Slides in this deck

Laoshi’s deck consists of 11 main slides and four appendix slides.

1. Cover slide
2. Problem slide
3. Market slide
4. Solution slide
5. Competition slide
6. Road map slide
7. Team slide
8. Teacher growth slide
9. Teacher retention slide
10.   Summary slide
11.  “Contact us” slide
12.  Appendices cover slide
13.   Appendix I: Viral effect slide
14.   Appendix II: Business model slide
15.   Appendix III: “The ask” slide

Three things to love

The deck is sparse and simple, which is pretty refreshing — a lot of early-stage decks don’t seem to have much of a story woven into them and try to cram way too much information (that isn’t really relevant) onto the slides.

The overarching thing you have to remember for an angel deck is that your investors know they are in the business of high-risk investing. So, make clear why your company is a good bet, that you have a path to solving a real problem and acquiring a huge market and that you have the team to pull it off.

Team slide is A+

[Slide 7] A team slide should convince investors that you’re the right folks to build this company. Image Credits: Laoshi

I’m not sure if I’m 100% on board with the H³ ethos of founding team building — it’s far more important that you have the right, deep domain knowledge and drive (often expressed as “founder-market fit”), but you also need a breadth of skills to build a good startup. I do admit H³ often is a good template to check out a team’s skill set quickly and to determine whether there are major gaps in the team.

This team slide does two things: It shows that the team is international and distributed. It is diverse and experienced. And it manages — in the box at the bottom — to show that the team has market-relevant experience. Now, I would still need a voice-over to find out:

• How did the team meet?
• What are each team member’s strengths and weaknesses?
• What’s missing from the team?
• Why can this team deliver in a way that nobody else can?
• What is the hiring plan for the current fundraise?

But as a base-level team slide, this ticks a lot of boxes. What it doesn’t show, however, are past successes in startups, and I’d want to dig into that a bit more as well. It certainly is a much better slide than many of the previous ones we’ve covered in these teardowns — you know, the ones that basically stick a Stanford and Tesla logo underneath a picture and call it a day.

The thing you can learn from this slide as a startup is that your team slide is up there with the most important slides, and you’ve got to make it count. Use it to tell your story and to convince us your team is part of the reason to bet on you.

Good summary slide

[Slide 10] A good summary slide can be a great way to remind investors why they should be excited. Image Credits: Laoshi

Almost as important as the numbers themselves are which numbers the company is measuring. It shows monthly and daily active users (MAU/DAU), which are crucial metrics to see how sticky an app is. It shows the number of teachers and how long they are staying on the platform, which again speaks to stickiness and the reach the company has. It talks about active user engagement, which shows that people are using the app actively.

For perfect marks, I’d love to have seen these numbers as graphs rather than just as collated numbers. I’d also have liked to see dollar figures here. It’s great that there are 200+ paying subscribers, and that’s impressive for a pre-funding company. But even though the revenue numbers probably are very small, seeing a graph of those, too, is important. If you don’t put it on the slide, the investor will be suspicious about why and ask for it anyway — you may as well skip that conversation and give ’em what they need right off the bat.

The thing you can learn from this slide as a startup is to be deeply aware of the metrics that are going to help you build and deliver your business.

Business model front and center

[Slide 14] It’s always a good idea to show that you understand the levers in your business. Image Credits: Laoshi

Having said that, these numbers are super important in your conversations with your investors; essentially, you’re showing how you are thinking about your business and your market and that you understand the levers in your business. In other words: What if every tutor had 10 students instead of five? What if every tutor cost $100 to acquire instead of $50? By plugging all of that into a model and running experiments to increase your trust in the model, you can get a long way toward building a great picture of your business in numbers.

In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Laoshi could have improved or done differently, along with the company’s full pitch deck!

Pitch Deck Teardown: Laoshi’s $570K angel deck by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

Samooha, a startup developing a “cross-cloud” data collaboration platform, today announced that it raised $12.5 million in a funding tranche backed by Altimeter Capital and Snowflake Ventures, among others. CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan says that the cash infusion — Samooha’s first — will be put toward product development and hiring; the plan is grow the startup’s team from 14 developers to roughly 20 by the end of the year.

So, you might be wondering, what exactly does Samooha do? In brief, the platform lets businesses securely share, collaborate on and gain insights from their and their partners’ data, irrespective of the underlying cloud and data stack.

It’s not a new concept. “Data clean rooms” have been around for a while, pitched both by tech giants and startups as the ideal solution for sharing sensitive data across computing environments. Just a few years ago, Harbr raised $38.5 million for its tech to help enterprises exchange and share big data troves securely. InfoSum and Decentriq also offer secure data-sharing tools, while Amazon Web Services recently launched a new data clean room product — called Clean Rooms, appropriately — aimed at organizations that regularly share data with outside partners.

To the extent Samooha’s differentiated, it leans heavily on the Snowflake ecosystem — which isn’t exactly surprising given Snowflake’s involvement in the startup’s fundraising. A native app on Snowflake, Samooha provides a no-code UI customers can use to access and build clean room apps. The underlying trust boundary of Snowflake’s native apps framework provides the secure computation environment, Sivaramakrishnan explained in an interview with TechCrunch, while eliminating the need for any data migration.

Image Credits: Samooha

“Security guarantees are enforced both technically via cryptographic multi-party computation technologies and with user-defined policies like approved query templates. This powers fast and secure analysis on joint data in the clean room,” she added. “Think of a very intuitive collaboration product experience like Slack where you are not simply communicating with co-workers in a channel but are actually learning, sharing and collaborating around data owned by you and your partner by running analytics workloads without moving and securing data in that channel or room.”

Samooha intends to go after verticals it believes might be especially underserved, like healthcare, financial services, advertising, retail and entertainment. Media in particular could prove to be lucrative; Gartner predicts that by 2023, 80% of advertisers with media budgets of $1 billion or more will use data clean rooms.

Sivaramakrishnan claims that Samooha already has Fortune 500 customers, although he wouldn’t name names. The sales pitch was made easier by the pandemic, she says, because it shone light on the need for data collaboration in a safe, secure fashion across industries.

It probably depends on the industry — an August 2022 survey by Habu found that over half of marketing professionals have never used a data clean room. But Samooha’s early traction suggests that there’s some truth to Sivaramakrishnan’s claims.

“Broadly speaking, leveraging customer, consumer and enterprise data is a fact of life for any industry and use case. But most businesses have an incomplete view of customer and consumer data,” Sivaramakrishnan said. “The pandemic shone light on the need for data collaboration in a safe, secure fashion across multiple industries, be that healthcare, manufacturing, supply chain and logistics, and more  … Our technology and product approach, coupled with the commercial model, gives us conviction that we are uniquely solving for a critical enterprise data function and hence, has the potential to withstand headwinds.”

Samooha launches with tech that lets companies share data securely by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

OneHouse emerged last year with a cloud data lake product built on top of the open source Apache Hudi project. The startup wants to act as an integration layer to move data between different repositories, rather than competing directly with larger data lake vendors like Snowflake and Databricks.

Today the company announced a $25 million Series A.

Company founder and CEO Vinoth Chandar came up with the idea for Hudi while he was an engineer at Uber in 2016, and eventually decided to start a company based on the open source project. He says that today his idea is to be a neutral, complementary layer between these other data lake products and interoperate with multiple formats, whatever they may be.

“Our thesis is that we live in a multi-engine world where there are many, many engines that are going to evolve and sit on top of the same data. We want to help organizations avoid migrating every time there is a new engine,” Chandar told TechCrunch.

The open source project has been gaining traction with 2200 pull requests on GitHub last year and more than 600 engaged users on the GitHub platform, according to the company.

Some percentage of those open source users will eventually want to move to the managed cloud service, and the company is working with paying customers today in production. For now though, product head Kyle Weller says the cloud product remains in preview mode to keep the number of paying customers at a manageable level.

“We’re still in a preview mode where we want to throttle how many people come in the door while we build up and and train our full global support team and some of these other building blocks and pieces,” Weller explained.

With the new cash, the company has been able to double the team, growing from 15 at the time of last year’s seed announcement to 30 today. The startup has been mostly focused on hiring engineering talent to this point, but Chandar says that the emphasis is  changing. “We hired more on the  product and engineering side in the last year, but given the current stage of our business, we will focus a lot more on hiring and expanding our go-to market team,” he said.

The $25 million Series A closed in the second half of last year, and was co-led by Addition and Greylock, the same firms that co-led the seed round. The new money brings the total raised $33 million.

OneHouse is building a neutral data lake integration layer on top of Apache Hudi by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

Europe has moved a step closer to having dedicated rules on online political ad targeting and transparency after the European Parliament fixed its negotiating position — paving the way for talks to start between MEPs and Member States to agree a final compromise text that can be passed into pan-EU law.

MEPs said they hope agreement can be reached in time to have the regulation in place for the next elections to the EU’s Parliament — in 2024.

Parliamentarians voted for a series of changes to the Commission’s original (rather weak) proposal which was presented back in November 2021— saying they’ve beefed up the draft so that only data “explicitly provided” for online political advertising can be used by advert providers for this purpose.

MEP Patrick Breyer, a co-negotiator on the file in the parliament’s civil liberties (LIBE) committee, dubbed it “a good day for democracy” — highlighting some of the agreed amendments parliamentarian want to see, including a stipulation that refusing consent for political ads targeting must be as simple as giving it (so no consent dark patterns); another that ‘do not track’ browser settings must be respected without hassling the user with more consent prompts (so no forcing consent by tiring web users who’ve already refused with fresh pop-ups); and a requirement that users who refuse consent should still be allowed access to the platforms (so no forcing consent, period).

MEPs backed the negotiating mandate on the file by a large majority — of 433 votes in favour, 61 against (and 110 abstentions).

“Platforms would be banned from running opaque ad delivery algorithms to determine who should see a political ad; they would only be able to select recipients randomly in the pool of people delineated by the targeting parameters chosen by the sponsor,” Breyer added in a press release rounding up key changes MEPs have proposed.

These also include a proposal for a 60 day pre-election (or referendum) period — during which there would be further limits on political message targeting, with MEPs wanting to restrict this to only a voter’s language and the constituency they live in to avoid the hyper-segmention of voters that’s possible thanks to ‘personalized’ political ads which has been shown to be so toxic to democratic accountability.

“Microtargeting, a strategy that uses consumer data and demographics to identify the interests of specific individuals, will therefore not be possible,” the parliament suggests in a press release.

In other changes, MEPs have also taken aim at foreign money seeking to influence EU elections — and proposed that non-EU based entities should be banned from financing political advertisements in the EU.

Although how effectively such a ban would or could be policed is another matter. (“To determine where such an entity is established, the relevant authorities should take into account where the ultimate controller of this entity is located,” is what the parliament says on that.)

MEPs have made other changes they say are aimed at improving transparency around political ads — such as pushing for the creation of an online repository for “all online political advertisements and related data”.

“It should be easier to obtain information on who is financing an advert, on its cost, and the origin of the money used,” they write. “Other pieces of information which should also be published include whether an advertisement has been suspended for violating the rules, on the specific groups of individuals targeted and what personal data were used for this, and the views and engagement with the advertisement. MEPs aim to give journalists a specific right to obtain such information.”

The Commission’s original proposal had proposed transparency labels for political ads, as well as some restrictions on microtargeting — but the vast majority of MEPs want to see tougher regulation of an arena where tech has gained a toxic reputation as a cheap, powerful and largely consequence-free tool for fiddling with democracy.

Hence they’ve also proposed the possibility of having periodic penalties levied for repeat violations — and the obligation for large ad service providers to suspend their services for 15 days with a particular client in the case of serious and systemic infringements. They also want the Commission to be able to introduce EU-wide “minimum sanctions”.

MEPs look keen to avoid any risk of forum shopping at the Member State level from undermining the rules by creating fresh workarounds — saying their adopted text both strengthens the powers of national data protection authorities (which will be expected to oversee compliance) but also empowers the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) to “take over an investigation into an infringement and enforce the rules”, i.e. if a DPA is finding it hard to do their duty and crack down on violators.

Breyer even directly names the (much criticized) Irish Data Protection Commission as a risk in this context, writing: “If a data protection authority such as the Irish DPA fails to enforce the rules against large online platforms, the EDPB would be able to take over.”

“In cases of illegal political ads targeting [the EDPB[] will not only be able to impose financial sanctions but also to temporarily suspend the targeting of ads by advertisers who seriously and systematically violated the rules. This ensures that more affluent sponsors are not able to simply factor-in the price of financial sanctions in their budget,” he adds.

Commenting in a statement, MEP and rapporteur for the file, Sandro Gozi, also said:

There is too much undue interference in our democratic processes. As legislators we have a responsibility to fight this but also to ensure debate remains open and free. This law will not kill political advertising, despite rumours spread by large online platforms. Nor will it stymie our freedom of expression. It will only limit abusive political advertising.

The European Council agreed its negotiating mandate on the regulation back in December — saying then that it wants to build on the Commission’s proposal by providing “greater legal certainty” re: the scope of the regulation; and around some of the key definitions, including in areas such as what is to be considered political advertising and how to identify a political ad.

It also sought to claim credit for proposing stronger transparency measures. Although the Council largely aligned with the Commission’s more limited approach on restricting political microtargeting — saying it wanted to ban targeting and amplification techniques using “sensitive” personal data, including inferred data, unless an adult “explicitly consents”; or is “a member or former member of a specifically defined not-for-profit body processing the sensitive data, or is in regular contact with it”. (But agreeing that the processing of minors’ data for political ads should be entirely banned.) 

While the parliament’s amendments propose to go further in restricting behaviorally targeted political ads there could still be scope for loopholes — as Breyer points out that limiting the application of the restrictions to “political advertising services” could, for instance, open a loophole for circumventing the rules if campaigns elect to directly send personally targeted letters, emails, or text messages “systematically and at large scale”.  Though he suggests MEPs may push to try to address such a scenario in the forthcoming trilogue talks.

Another gap the regulation does not address is organic, self-posted political content — which is (currently) excluded from the proposed targeting restrictions. So there’s also a risk that election fiddlers could fly under the radar by using fake social media accounts to post and amplify political propaganda — something that already happens at scale of course. So that looks like another major weak point.

That said, MEPs previously pushed for — and won — some softer but more general limits on behavioral targeting via the Digital Services Act (which applies to digital intermediary services and platforms) — including a ban on the processing of minors’ data for targeting ads; and a ban on the use of sensitive data for ad targeting of adults. So the scope for tracking-and-profiling web users in order to target them with ‘personalized’ content is facing a growing range of restrictions in the EU — where adtech platforms are also seeing an increase in enforcements of breaches of existing data protection and ePrivacy rules.

Political ads face tougher targeting restrictions in EU if MEPs get their way by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

Two EV startups may soon be battling it out in court over alleged breach of contract and patent infringement.

EV startup Bollinger Motors filed a lawsuit this week in the U.S. District of Southern New York against Munro Vehicles, and its head designer, over alleged breach of contract, patent infringement and trade dress infringement, according to court documents.

The central figures in the lawsuit are the Bollinger B1 SUV and B2 truck, the Munro MK_1 SUV and Ross Compton, a former contract designer for Bollinger who went on to become lead designer for Munro. Bollinger alleges in the lawsuit that Compton breached his contract and violated a mutual non-disclosure agreement by referring to confidential Bollinger files, with Munro’s awareness, while designing Munro products.

Image credit: Screenshot from court filing

Bollinger also alleges that Munro has infringed on two of its patents for its original vehicle designs and trade dress infringement, a legal term that means the likeness between the brands’ products could cause confusion in a buyer’s mind. Bollinger claims that this will inflict irreparable harm to the brand.

Image Credits: Screenshot from court filing

Munro CEO Russell Peterson told TechCrunch in an emailed statement that the company is aware of the allegations raised by Bollinger Motors inc.

“The company takes IP infringement extremely seriously and Munro intends to robustly defend its position over the unique design of the Munro MK_1 all-terrain vehicle,” he wrote.

Bollinger and Munro both have developed rugged all-terrain vehicles meant for commercial use. Scotland-based Munro is specifically targeting farmers, miners and those who work in heavy industry sectors. The company, which was founded in 2021 by Peterson and Ross Anderson, has said it plans to bring its Munro MK_1 to market in 2024.

Bollinger Motors, a Michigan-based startup founded by Robert Bollinger in 2015, is focused on producing all-electric commercial vehicles for classes 3 through 6. The company initially planned to produce the Bollinger B1 and B2 off-road electric SUV and pickup trucks. It later introduced a chassis designed for a Class 3 commercial vehicle with the aim to expand its customer base.

Bollinger paused development on its B1 and B2 vehicles in January 2022. Nine months later, Mullen Automotive, an EV startup that went public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, took a 60% stake in Bollinger. The transaction injected a needed $148.2 million into the startup.

The companies said, at the time, that the investment would help fast-track the development of Bollinger’s class commercial electric trucks, including a class 4 vehicle expected in 2023, and help it resume its consumer truck program.

Bollinger still maintains its own board of directors and Robert Bollinger continues to serve as the CEO. When asked about the lawsuit, Robert Bollinger said Mullen isn’t mentioned in the lawsuit because the company retains ownership of the IP portfolio and has the obligation of defending it. 

Bollinger Motors sues Munro Vehicles over similarity of its EVs by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

Shopify powers a massive number of e-commerce sites, so it’s also no surprise that there is a vast ecosystem of tools around it that help these merchants manage all aspects of running their stores. Triple Whale, a Columbus, Ohio-based startup, focuses on providing Shopify store owners with a single platform that brings together all of their analytics into a single service to help them improve their conversion numbers and get better insights into their marketing campaigns. Using all of this data, the team is now also starting to build smart, AI-based tools on top of it.

The company today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series B round from NFX and Elephant, with strategic participation from Shopify itself. That’s on top of the company’s 2022 $24 million Series A round (led by Elephant) and its $2.7 million seed round (led by NFX). To raise this much these days, startups have to show considerable traction. The team says it saw 1,400 percent year-over-year growth, with over 5,000 brands now using its service. The company notes that these brands generated over $14 billion in sales last year.

Image Credits: Triple Whale

Triple Whale was co-founded by AJ Orbach (CEO), Ivan Chernykh (CTO) and Maxx Blank (COO). Orbach and Blank, who grew up together in the same neighborhood in Jerusalem, came into the Shopify ecosystem by running their own brands and stores on the platform, with Chernykh joining them at Triple Whale as their technical co-founder. The idea behind Triple Whale was to take a lot of the processes they used to run their stores and turn them into a product.

“I took the spreadsheets that I was using to track my ad spent and the overall KPIs that I needed to watch, and we took that and we productized it and made it into a mobile app that a lot of people liked,” Orbach explained. “We took a lot of the playbook from what we learned in D2C with influencer marketing and really applied it to a community that we found on Twitter — which was very influential in the D2C space and we used that playbook to get a lot of the traction.”

Just around this time in late 2020, Apple launched iOS 14 and with that, it’s new privacy features. This meant that many store owners couldn’t rely on the data they were getting from Facebook anymore, so Triple Whale built a new attribution system for them (dubbed Pixel) which is now at the core of its platform.

AJ Orbach (CEO), Maxx Blank (COO) and Ivan Chernykh (CTO)

“The data coming from Facebook was just a mess. There was no way we could make any sense of it. And so we said, we have to build attribution,” explained Blank. “First of all, our clients are suffering because they don’t have visibility, but also, if we want to start building automation, we need to correct data.”

With Pixel, Triple Whale can offer first-party attribution and real-time data for merchants, but what the team is now focused on is building out its automation, machine learning and generative AI-based tooling around that. Some of that is pretty straightforward, like its new rules engine and ‘AI Timing’ feature which helps merchants automate their media buying, for example.

“We will give you the best time to buy over the week based on your data and then you’ll be able to use our rules engine to, for example, shut the ad off between 12 and 6 at night so you don’t waste money,” Blank explained.

Image Credits: Triple Whale

Using generative AI, the team also plans to soon launch new services that will help merchants generate ad copy and images. It’s also soon launching a new tool, Lighthouse, which looks for anomalies (maybe a product is selling significantly faster than usual) and then alerts users and recommends potential actions to capitalize on this.

As the founders noted, the core idea was always to offer a centralized data platform, a layer of visualization on top of that and then automation tools that help users leverage this data to grow their businesses.

The team tells me that many of the brands on its service are currently generating between $1 million and $50 million per year. But with many larger brands now also starting to use its service, the team is also starting to look into how it can best serve these larger customers. The company’s pricing is based on which tools a merchant wants to use, but its full-stack suite currently sells for $400/month, with the dashboard without Pixel attribution costing $100/month.

“Triple Whale has built an excellent marketing analytics platform that equips multi-channel merchants with the marketing insights they need in a fast-evolving online retail landscape,” said Sabrina Frias, Corporate Development Manager at Shopify. “This strategic investment will help scaling merchants better understand the impact of their marketing spend to scale operations. We look forward to seeing what this team can do!”

Triple Whale raises $25M for its Shopify data platform by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

Hip-hop artist Saweetie is performing exclusively in Roblox for the NFL’s Super Bowl LVII pregame on February 10, the National Football League announced today.

The virtual concert will take place at 7:00 pm ET in Warner Music Group’s Rhythm City, a new destination on Roblox that was announced earlier this week. Rhythm City is set to launch on February 4 and offers mini-games and social roleplaying experiences like becoming a musician and owning a house and car.

The NFL claims that Saweetie will give a “family-friendly,” fully motion-captured performance and sing her hit songs like “Tap-In.” The concert will re-air every hour until Sunday, February 12.

Fans that virtually attend the Saweetie Super Bowl Concert can also get digital items on the Roblox marketplace or win items by finishing challenges. The digital collection includes wearable hairstyles, hats, boots, headphones, and sweatsuits, which are based on Saweetie’s merchandise and her album looks.

“I’m really excited to bring this iconic moment to the metaverse and share my music with a whole new audience in such a unique way! As an artist, innovator, and football fan, to be able to perform during Super Bowl LVII weekend in this new world – Rhythm City on Roblox – is something I never imagined that I would be involved in. I am very grateful and happy about this opportunity,” Saweetie said in a statement.

Image Credits: Roblox/NFL

The NFL is also launching Super NFL Tycoon within Roblox. The metaverse experience allows users to pretend that they’re NFL team owners, draft a team, and build a stadium. Super NFL Tycoon will launch on February 4 to coincide with the virtual Super Bowl concert. Users can move between Super NFL Tycoon and Rhythm City through a designated portal.

Interestingly, the experience–which is presented by the global financial technology platform Intuit—is also an attempt to teach younger users “important financial concepts in a fun and engaging manner,” said Lara Balazs, Intuit’s Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager of Strategic Partner Group. So, while users fantasize about owning an NFL team, they can also learn how to manage cash flow, payroll, taxes, and customer acquisition (because that’s supposed to be fun somehow).

The concert, Super NFL Tycoon, and Rhythm City are also developed in partnership with Gamefam, a gaming company across metaverse platforms.

“Bringing a cultural moment like the Super Bowl to the metaverse with such innovative partners marks a shift in how brands are coming together to create the next generation of metaverse gaming experiences,” said Ricardo Briceno, Chief Business Officer of Gamefam.

This is the second year in a row that NFL and Roblox are offering the NFL Tycoon experience. For the 2022 Super Bowl, Roblox users could attend an interactive event called “Destruction House,” inspired by the Super Bowl LVI commercial. Also, in 2021, Roblox launched a virtual NFL storefront, giving users NFL-themed digital items to dress up their Roblox avatars.

The NFL’s foray into the metaverse points how the league tries to cater to a younger demographic.

“Working with Roblox has enabled us to create interactive shared experiences and with the virtual concert and Super NFL Tycoon, we will unlock deeper fan engagement,” said Ed Kiang, VP of Video Gaming at the NFL.

Roblox reported that its third quarter saw the fastest year-over-year growth in daily active users that range from 17 to 24 years old, which saw an increase of 41%. Roblox’s daily active users that are older than 13 years old grew by 34% year-over-year and accounted for 54% of all daily active users.

The streaming rights deal with Amazon has proven to attract a younger audience for the NFL. Amazon reported that Thursday Night Football (TNF) on Prime Video delivered an audience eight years younger than last year’s average TNF audience. The NFL also recently struck a deal with YouTube for the Sunday Ticket.

Super Bowl LVII will take place next Sunday, February 12, with the Kansas City Chiefs playing against the Philadelphia Eagles.

In September, Apple Music announced it is the official sponsor of the Super Bowl Halftime Show.

Roblox to host a free virtual Super Bowl concert featuring Saweetie by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

Over the past few years, we’ve spoken with hundreds of hardware startups, and there’s one phrase that has been showing up in almost every interview: “supply chains.”

They were always important for people shipping physical products, of course, but the pandemic and the international logistics chaos that resulted from it made the pain of getting components to factories and products from factories to warehouses, then to stores and to customers, all the more present.

A few of the founders TechCrunch spoke to at CES in Las Vegas this year seemed to be optimistic, saying that some of the supply-chain crisis is on its way to being resolved, while others laughed at the suggestion that all of this is behind us. We decided to find out what the status is.

I spoke with supply-chain experts Fictiv to figure out whether the light at the end of the tunnel is daylight or the headlights of an oncoming train. If anyone knows what’s going on, it’s Fictiv CEO Dave Evans. He’s been running the manufacturing platform for more than a decade; before that, he was part of the Advanced Manufacturing Group at the World Economic Forum and a lead hardware engineer at Ford. We talked to Evans about the status quo and the near future of hardware manufacturing, seen through the lens of startups.

“The main problem for early-stage startups is that it’s really difficult to get someone to care. You might care about your product, but nobody else does because you’re too small. Suppliers will ask if you have volume. If you don’t, why would they work with you?” Evans said, pointing out that relationships are super important with whoever your supplier base is. He noted that you have to be the right size for your suppliers. If you’re too small, they don’t want to deal with you. But if you’re too big, that’s also a problem.

“When I was Ford, you know, there were a lot of great suppliers, but they only do $10 million a year. At Ford, we never worked with them, because there was simply too much risk.”

I asked Evans if the supply chain crisis was finally in the rearview mirror. When he was done laughing, he had a pretty simple answer: Nope.

“Is it over? I would say, unequivocally, no. I think we’ve shifted from a conversation about ‘if’ to a conversation about ‘when.’ I don’t think we are at the peak of it by any means,” he said, adding that while the pandemic was a big hit, supply-chain resiliency itself has been a conversation among his peers for a very long time. “We can go back to 2019 and talk about trade wars. We can go to 2020 and talk about pandemics, the Suez Canal, we can talk about shipping delays and massive global conflict in Europe. We can talk about recessions and all of these things that disrupt global trade and supply chains.”

The big change that happened during the pandemic, however, was that supply-chain disruptions started showing up in the lives of people who weren’t supply-chain professionals. Average consumers suddenly couldn’t buy the kind of ketchup they wanted, or the new car they were excited about was delayed, or they couldn’t get the right stuff at the hardware store to renovate their homes.

For businesses, disruptions were mostly hidden from view before the pandemic, something the chief supply chain officer would take care of. It went from a functional, practical problem that affected a part of the business to a management problem where the whole team suddenly started caring. Suddenly, everyone had to know why there were delays in shipping, gaping holes in the financial statements and questions from the board.

Dave Evans, CEO at Fictiv. Image Credits: Fictiv

“I think what this is doing is forcing companies to rethink their supply-chain strategies and modernize them, versus if we went back three, four years ago, people didn’t really care,” Evans said. “Before Amazon, there wasn’t this much pressure to ship in two days, but now the supply chain is a critical business function for anybody that ships a physical good. And I think we are probably at the peak or close to that peak of demand for change.”

Let’s take a look at how hardware startups can think about de-risking their products and supply chains and figure out how to think about resiliency.

How Fictiv is making hardware manufacturing more like building software by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

BlockJoy, a startup providing white label blockchain nodes as a service, raised a total of $12 million from its seed and Series A rounds, the company exclusi1vely shared with TechCrunch.

The Boston-based startup aims to reduce operating costs by up to 80% for enterprises running staking nodes and APIs as a service, the two co-founders, Sean Carey and Chris Bruce, said to TechCrunch.

“On AWS, it would cost $200 a month per node, but we rethought the web3 infrastructure and we are able to run those same nodes for about $11 a month, shaving about 80% of cost,” Bruce said.

Carey, who’s also the Helium co-founder, and Bruce, a four-time founder, began BlockJoy as a staking service side project. “We started this completely by accident,” Carey said. “We wanted to stake tokens and the systems to do it weren’t sensible […] so Chris and I worked together to create this project and the birth of BlockJoy happened.”

BlockJoy was “never intended to be a company — it was supposed to be for friends and family,” Bruce shared. “But after six months, people were coming in and staking nodes with us, and six months into our launch, we were running 1,200 validators for the Helium Network.”

Investors include Gradient Ventures, Draper Dragon, Dragon Roark, Active Capital, Borderless HNT and Renegade Ventures, among others.

The startup built BlockVisor, its patented blockchain node management software, which lets users run blockchain nodes on any infrastructure in an automated, cost-effective manner through a “point-and-click” user interface, Bruce said.

This means enterprises using BlockJoy’s service can deploy and manage blockchains, nodes, validators and ETLs (extract, transform, load) with “a click of a button,” Carey noted.

The capital will be used to launch BlockVisor, which is now open in beta mode. “It allows anyone to launch a node wherever they want on our infrastructure, their infrastructure or even through the cloud,” Bruce said.

“BlockJoy is a web3 infrastructure company at a fundamental level,” Bruce said. “That means we have a platform that helps node operators like Blockdaemon, Alchemy or any exchange or business that runs nodes for their business.”

The team currently works with a handful of crypto companies, including Binance, Crypto.com and the Helium Foundation, Carey shared. It’s also onboarding new blockchains, including Ethereum 2, Cosmos, Polygon, Solana, Algorand and Avalanche. By the end of its beta launch, BlockJoy aims to support about 25 blockchains, Bruce said.

“We allow them to operate those nodes in a decentralized manner just like they’re running them on the cloud with software specifically designed for blockchain nodes,” Bruce said. It typically takes node operators four to six months to implement new protocols, but BlockJoy can implement them within a matter of days to weeks, he added.

In the long term, BlockJoy hopes to make its technology more accessible so that running a node is easy enough that anyone can do it, Bruce said. “We want to provide infrastructure that’s drop-dead simple but not centralized. We want to see the proliferation of web3, and this is step one.”

BlockJoy raises $12M to help cut operating costs for businesses running blockchain nodes by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

TikTok today is announcing several changes to its service, including what it claims will be increased enforcement against bad actors as well as tests of new user-facing tools that will force a refresh of the app’s main algorithmic feed, known as the For You feed. The company said the changes are focused on keeping the platform both safe and entertaining for its users and creators alike.

While all major social media companies have content guidelines, their enforcement varies. As is often the case, people who violate the rules and are subject to takedowns of their content or bans, don’t always learn from their mistakes — they just become repeat violators. Today, TikTok’s enforcement system includes a variety of penalties, like temporary bans on posting or commenting, designed to reduce harmful content on the platform.

However, admits TikTok’s Global Head of Product Policy, Julie de Bailliencourt, in an announcement, creators complain that the current system can be confusing to navigate — especially if they don’t typically break TikTok’s rules or have unknowingly violated policy, and aren’t sure why they’ve been penalized. What’s more, this system is not efficient at deterring repeat violators, the exec explained

“Repeat violators tend to follow a pattern – our analysis has found that almost 90% violate using the same feature consistently, and over 75% violate the same policy category repeatedly,” de Bailliencourt wrote.

As a result, TikTok will move instead to a strike system, similar to YouTube. In all but the most severe cases, creators will accrue strikes as their content is removed. If they then reach a threshold of strikes within either a product feature (like comments or TikTok LIVE), or policy (like bullying or harassment), they will be permanently banned. The company said the threshold will vary depending on the violation and its potential to harm community members. It said, for instance, there may be a lower threshold for violating hateful content policies than there would be for posting low-harm spam.

TikTok will still issue permanent bans for severe violations, like videos that are “promoting or threatening violence, showing or facilitating child sexual abuse material (CSAM), or showing real-world violence or torture,” the post said.

The accumulated strikes will expire from an account’s record after 90 days, but accounts that “accrue a high number of cumulative strikes across policies and features” will be permanently banned. TikTok did not detail what a “high number” would be, nor did it share more information about what the thresholds are in the various areas. That could potentially cause more confusion among creators as they try to reverse engineer the system based on which accounts received strikes and why.

Creators will soon be able to track their own strikes and their account’s standing in the app, TikTok said, through an update to the Safety Center for creators. Here, they can view their own status and the status of the reports they’ve made on other videos or accounts. They’ll also be able to appeal strikes from this Safety Center if they feel they were given out in error. If the creator is close to a permanent ban, TikTok will notify them.

Related to this, the company said it will also begin to test a new feature in select markets that will inform creators which videos of theirs have been marked as ineligible for recommendation to users’ For You feeds, and why.

For end users, however, another new test may be more interesting.

Soon, TikTok will allow some users to tap a new “Refresh” button to receive an updated set of For You feed recommendations. Though TikTok’s feed is highly personalized and fairly addictive, many complain the content becomes stale as it doesn’t add enough variety after some time. With the new refresh button, which will be available in account settings, users will be able to force the app to bring “new, diversified content not based on previous activity or interactions” to their For You feed.

After hitting the button, users will then begin to see content that’s based on their new interactions, a TikTok spokesperson told TechCrunch. In addition to providing a refreshed feed, the company noted that the feature could serve as a way to support potentially vulnerable users who want to distance themselves from their current content experience.

The changes to TikTok’s policies and product come on the heels of increased concern over the app’s ties to China and the risks it poses. Across the U.S., TikTok has been banned on government devices after executive orders from governors prohibited the app. Several universities have banned the app on their Wi-Fi networks as well. And the Biden administration banned TikTok from government devices in a bill signed at the end of December. In response, TikTok has been taking meetings with officials, think tanks, and public interest groups in Washington, The New York Times reported, and this week invited media to tour its Transparency and Accountability Center in L.A.

Amid the increasing calls for a nationwide ban in the U.S., TikTok has been working to convince the public of its platform safety and rolling out new transparency tools that inform users why videos were recommended or allow them to filter out specific content. However, with every new announcement, there comes a bit of bad press, too. For instance, it was revealed last month the company had a secret heating button to make videos go viral, and just before that, Forbes reported TikTok had spied on its journalists. These reveals have tarnished the company’s image further at a time when it’s trying to increase trust.

TikTok says the refresh button will roll out in the “coming days” while the policy update is currently rolling out globally and users will be notified as it’s available to them.

TikTok introduces a strike system for violations, tests a feature to “refresh” the For You feed by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch