Month: October 2019

Polte has raised another $12.5 million. The company is building a service that leverages 4G (and potentially 5G) signal to track things for commercial and industrial use cases. The main advantage is that using cellular signal uses a lot less battery than acquiring GPS location and transmitting it over cellular.

Today’s funding round is an extension of the company’s Series A round. In 2017, Polte raised $6 million — and the company is raising another $12.5 million this year. Polte isn’t disclosing the list of investors. The startup participated in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield.

There are many potential use cases for Polte, but most of them involve tracking stuff on the move with as little battery as possible. You could use it for your supply chain, if you’re running a logistics or transportation company, in the energy or automotive industry, etc.

If you want to use an IoT device to track a package over multiple weeks, it can be a costly effort as you need to determine the location of the package using GPS and transmit the location of the package over the air. While GPS is insanely accurate, it also requires a ton of battery just to position a device on a map.

That’s why some devices rely on Wi-Fi signal to triangulate a position with a database of Wi-Fi access points. But that’s not as accurate, especially in the countryside.

Polte turns data from the cell modem into location information. It works with existing modems; Polte is a software solution. None of the computing is done on the device itself. Polte-enabled devices transmit 300 bytes of data back to Polte’s servers so the company can determine the location a few seconds later.

This way, you can use cheaper IoT devices to track packages. And if you’re running a company that wants to track thousands or millions of items, that could help you save a ton of money over the long run.

Source: Tech Crunch

Waymo and Renault are working with the Paris region to explore the possibility of establishing an autonomous transportation route between Charles de Gaulle airport and La Défense, a neighborhood just outside of Paris city limits that plays host to a large number of businesses and skyscrapers, including a large shopping center. This is part of the deal that Renault and Nissan signed with Waymo earlier this year, to work together on potential autonomous vehicle services in both Japan and France.

This route in particular is being explored as a lead-up project to potentially be ready in time for the Paris Olympic Games, which are taking in place in Summer 2024. The goal is to offer a convenient way for people living in the Île-de-France area where Paris is located to get around, while also providing additional transportation options for tourists and international visitors. The region is committing €100 million (around $110 million) to developing autonomous vehicle infrastructure in the area to serve this purpose, across a number of different projects.

“France is a recognized global mobility leader, and we look forward to working with the Ile-de-France Region and our partner Groupe Renault to explore deploying the Waymo Driver on the critical business route stretching from Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport to La Défense in Paris,” said Waymo’s Adam Frost, Chief Automotive Programs and Partnerships Officer, in an emailed statement.

Defined routes designed to meet a specific need, especially in time for showcase events like the Olympics, seems to be a likely way that Waymo and others focused on the deployment of autonomous services will work in terms of pilot deployments, since it’s a perfect blend of demand, regulatory exemption and motivation and city/partner support.

Source: Tech Crunch

Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, we hosted a panel on the Extra Crunch stage on “How to build a billion-dollar SaaS company.” A better title probably would have been “How to build a successful SaaS company.”

We spoke to Whitney Bouck, COO at HelloSign; Jyoti Bansal, CEO and founder at Harness, and Neeraj Agrawal, a partner at Battery Ventures to get their view on how to move through the various stages to build that successful SaaS company.

While there is no magic formula, we covered a lot of ground, including finding a product-market fit, generating early revenue, the importance of building a team, what to do when growth slows and finally, how to resolve the tension between growth and profitability.

Finding product-market fit

Neeraj Agrawal: When we’re talking to the market, what we’re really looking for is a repeatable pattern of use cases. So when we’re talking to prospects — the words they use, the pain point they use — are very similar from call to call to call? Once we see that pattern, we know we have product-market fit, and then we can replicate that.

Jyoti Bansal: Revenue is one measure of product-market fit. Are customers adopting it and getting value out of it and renewing? Until you start getting a first set of renewals and a first set of expansions and happy successful customers, you don’t really have product-market fit. So that’s the only way you can know if the product is really working or not.

Whitney Bouck: It isn’t just about revenue — the measures of success at all phases have to somewhat morph. You’ve got to be looking at usage, at adoption, value renewals, expansion, and of course, the corollary, churn, to give you good health indicators about how you’re doing with product-market fit.

Generating early revenue

Jyoti Bansal: As founders we’ve realized, getting from idea to early revenue is one of the hardest things to do. The first million in revenue is all about street fighting. Founders have to go out there and win business and do whatever it takes to get to revenue.

As your revenue grows, what you focus on as a company changes. Zero to $1 million, your goal is to find the product-market fit, do whatever it takes to get early customers. One million to $10 million, you start scaling it. Ten million to $75 million is all about sales, execution, and [at] $75 million plus, the story changes to how do you go into new markets and things like that.

Whitney Bouck: You really do have to get that poll from the market to be able to really start the momentum and growth. The freemium model is one of the ways that we start to engage people — getting visibility into the product, getting exposure to the product, really getting people thinking about, and frankly, spreading the word about how this product can provide value.

Photo: Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch

Building an executive team

Neeraj Agrawal: We talk about hiring an HR leader earlier in the cycle at roughly 100 employees, and the reason for that is, it’s helpful for a founder to have someone who they can think of as an internal partner to build the executive team.

If you get the executive team wrong, you can easily lose a year or two, and many times in my experience that could be the difference between ending up first in a category and ending up second in a category. Unfortunately, if you end up second in a category, you basically wasted probably five to 10 years of your life — and as investors, we’re lucky to get our money back. It’s a winner take all dynamic out there.

Whitney Bouck: The founder often embodies that initial vision, and some of the early employees are clearly a huge part of that. But I don’t think you can ever take your eye off the ball of bringing that vision together in an articulate way that people can really understand, and really internalize that you want every employee to feel like they’re part of something meaningful, and that they get excited and passionate about it, because that’s when they’re going to do their best work.

Developing a company culture

Jyoti Bansal: It’s very important for the CEOs and the management team to be very deliberate about it. You have to articulate and line up that these are the things we care about as a company. So these are our goals and this is our vision, and this is how we want to do business. Many times people talk about how a culture evolves, which is true, but I also believe that you also have to be a bit deliberate about what kind of culture would you want, and at least write it down.

Whitney Bouck: I feel like to go out there and just sell sell sell is a recipe for potential disaster, In all of my experience in running sales organizations, the best selling strategy is to be a great partner to your customer and really try to understand what problem are they solving, I don’t want to sell somebody something if it doesn’t actually solve their problem. They’re just not going to renew. I’d much rather sell them something that we both recognize as a good fit, and make them feel like, wow, I’ve got not only a solution to my problem, but I’m working with a great company that I want to do business with.

Photo” Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

What to do when growth falters

Neeraj Agrawal: From my perspective, when companies have issues, it’s usually hard to diagnose how much of it is a product-market related issue, and how much is an execution-related issue — and usually, it’s a little bit of both. What you do to fix it depends on the reason. As an investor, I tend to form my own point of view on the situation, and if I believe in the product-market space, then if it’s an execution issue, we can help the founder to bring in new execs that are capable of scaling at that level.

Whitney Bouck: That’s a huge testament for having key performance indicators well defined early on because it’s the only way of monitoring [your performance] on a regular basis. If you start to see anomalies that say, ‘Hey, wait a second, something’s changing. What is it?’ And that gives you the wherewithal to dig in. I can’t emphasize it enough. I think there’s no stage too early to have good well-defined performance indicators.

The tension between profitability and growth

Neeraj Agrawal: At a high level, there’s a spectrum between profitability and growth. In essence, you’re figuring out the right point in that spectrum to set for the company for the upcoming year. That is dependent on a bunch of things like the market, the competitive landscape, and equally important is the [state of the] capital market. If it’s a frothy capital market, and you can raise a lot of money and give up very little of your company, yes, you should probably lean in. But if it’s a tough capital market, and you’re going to give up a lot of your company for a little bit of money, you probably shouldn’t lean in. So this question is dependent on a lot of external factors.

Jyoti Bansal: The question for enterprise software companies is a bit different. It all becomes about whether the unit economics is normal. If they’re doing something that’s not right about unit economics, then investors and the market should question that and the burn becomes a question of whether you are you funding growth more or not?  Are you hiring more salespeople, going into more geographies, building more products, things like that.

Source: Tech Crunch

These are dark days for trust. Darkest of all for marketers and advertisers.

Only 3% of people trust marketing and advertising, the lowest of any industry or practice, and that trust is falling fastest among millennials, an ominous sign for the future.

We have no one to blame but ourselves.

Like everyone else, we’ve been blinded by the promise of tech’s false promise of “Big Data Solves Everything.” Martech is driving the dialog in our industry right now, and they’re telling us that collecting as much consumer data as possible — regardless of the actual value of that data, and regardless of our consumer’s best interests — will reveal a magic growth formula.

That’s a farce. There is no magic growth formula, and tech won’t do your job for you. Believing that amassing data will save your business instead of focusing on fundamentals has only led to lazy marketing, plummeting consumer trust and a two-fold increase in the number of expensive martech solutions over the last two years.

Public awareness of the surveillance economy is sharpening. The press is increasingly paying attention to business AND advertising practices. Consumers are voting with their wallets and choosing to walk away from companies that don’t practice the values they preach. This is a trend that will speed up, not slow down. The skepticism that has recently emerged around Amazon’s new Alexa announcements is just the most recent example of this.

How soon before marketers and advertisers end up on The New York Times naughty list? How much longer will consumers tolerate the hypocrisy of brands claiming to care for them while they vacuum up their personal data? Is it worth the risk to your brand and your business?

If you are a marketer reading this: You can do better.

Being a lean data company doesn’t mean being a martyr — just the opposite. The top 10 U.S. most trustworthy S&P 500 companies outperform the market by 25-50%.

But it does mean doing something counterintuitive for many marketers in the era of big tech and adtech. It means striving to collect only the consumer data that you really need to give equal or greater value back to your customer — and protecting it. It means no more selling, sharing and buying user data. It means being transparent about your marketing practices.

Doing so will take your focus off data collection for the sake of data collection and put that focus where it belongs — on understanding your customer’s needs, delivering them more and more value and regaining their trust and respect.

This isn’t just empty talk.

At Mozilla we’re backing up this lean data commitment with action. In the spirit of truly putting our users’ interests first, the latest release of the Firefox browser blocks third-party cookies by default. Frankly, we had anticipated some pushback from publishers, but instead they’ve told us they haven’t experienced the impact they expected, which is pushing them to question the actual value of the data they’d been collecting and revisit their own practices.

A lean data movement is growing. Others have taken action too, and there are many more who believe that doing what’s right for your business means doing what’s right for your consumers.

So whatever your own lean data commitment looks like, make it now, before it’s too late. As marketers and advertisers, we’ve survived some seismic shifts over the last few years, but no one can survive 0% trust.

Source: Tech Crunch

BoxGroup, the seed-stage investment firm led by David Tisch, has today announced that it has raised its very first fund from limited partners. To date, Box Group has been internally backed, meaning that the cash came from none other than the three partners at the firm, David Tisch, Adam Rothenberg, and Nimi Katragadda. BoxGroup has primarily written smaller checks, usually between $250K and $500K, for early stage startups.

The new fund is actually two separate funds: a regular seed fund and an Opportunity fund, each managing $82.5 million in capital. Limited partners in BoxGroup IV include Willoughby Capital, TrueBridge, and founders from BoxGroup’s portfolio, TJ Parker (PillPack), Jeff Raider (Harry’s) and Nat Turner (Flatiron Health).

That said, not much should change at BoxGroup. The firm will still be writing $250K to $500K checks for pre-seed, seed, and early Series A companies as a participant, not a lead.

“The most important part of our message with this is that we’re not changing,” said Tisch. “In an industry where everyone is regularly changing, we believe it’s important to stay true to what we do, which is write collaborative seed checks.”

BoxGroup doesn’t take board seats or ‘ownership’ over the companies in which it invests, but rather participates in seed rounds across a wide variety of verticals, including health, biotech, and food among the usual suspects like SaaS products, marketplaces and ecommerce.

The portfolio thus far includes names like Warby Parker, Airtable, Flexport, Roman, and RigUp, which recently raised $300 million led by Andreessen Horowitz. The firm also takes a shine to New York-based companies, including Bowery Farms, Classpass, Glossier, Chief, Mirror, and David Chang’s Ando.

BoxGroup has also had three separate (nearly) billion dollar exits: Flatiron Health which sold to Roche for $2.1 billion, Harry’s which sold for $1.37 billion to Edgewell Personal Care, and PillPack which sold to Amazon for just shy of a billion.

So why raise outside capital after 10 years of internal backing?

“This is the right evolution for our fund,” said Tisch. “It takes about ten years to get returns and results in this business and we’re about ten years old. We feel very good about what we’re doing. We have the confidence and track record now to justify asking other people to take risks on us and our model.”

Tisch added that this external money will allow BoxGroup to better support its portfolio of early stage companies with follow-on investments.

Source: Tech Crunch

Color Genomics, the genetics testing company, is partnering with Alphabet’s health technology focused subsidiary, Verily Life Sciences, to provide information from its genetic tests to the company’s Baseline Health Study participants.

The emphasis from both companies is on providing “actionable” results.

While genetic testing services have caught the public’s imagination for their ability to provide insights into an individual’s ancestry, the technology has proven to be less effective in providing insights on health that accurate enough to be clinically relevant.

Through the partnership, Project Baseline Health participants will be able to access Color’s physician-ordered genomics testing services and the company’s board-certified genetic counselors and pharmacists to help them understand what their genetic tests indicate about their risks for certain cancers, heart disease, and genes that can effect medication responses, the company said.

Offering the Color genetic testing services is another way Verily is trying to entice people into its attempt to provide a map of overall population health using the latest in data science and testing technologies.

Color’s genetic tests can be ordered online with participants taking their own samples at home. Users then receive counseling over the phone and tests are done . in a matter of weeks, according to the company.

By offering Color’s consultation services, Verily is hoping to ensure that the genetic information that participants in its “Baseline” study are providing benefit individuals as well as the study’s architects.

Source: Tech Crunch

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Apple pulls HKmap from App Store, the day after Chinese state media criticized its ‘unwise and reckless decision’ to approve it

Less than a day after Apple was criticized by Chinese state media for allowing HKmap in the App Store, the crowdsourced map app said it had been delisted.

This is Apple’s second reversal on the issue, which it explained with a statement claiming it learned that the app “has been used in ways that endanger law enforcement and residents in Hong Kong.”

2. Grammarly raises $90M at over $1B+ valuation for its AI-based grammar and writing tools

Grammarly provides a toolkit used today by 20 million people to correct their written grammar, suggest better ways to write things and moderate their tone depending on who will be doing the reading.

3. Okta wants to make every user a security ally

Okta is giving end users information about suspicious activity involving their login, while letting them share information with the company’s security apparatus.

4. Waymo to customers: ‘Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way’

Waymo’s existing programs all use a human safety driver behind the wheel. Now the Alphabet-owned company is getting ready for completely driverless rides.

5. Calm and Room made a $4,000 branded ‘meditation booth’

From the looks of it, the Calm Booth by Room is little more than a standard Room booth, with frosted glass, softer lighting and “a soothing misty forest interior.” But it’s a pretty smart partnership between two white-hot startups.

6. Creators of modern rechargeable batteries share Nobel prize

The prize this year honors M. Stanley Whittingham, John Goodenough and Akira Yoshino, all of whom contributed to the development of what is today the most common form of portable power.

7. Silicon Valley’s competing philosophies on tech ethics with The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz

Marantz has in recent years trained his attention on the tech world and its contribution to social unrest in the United States and beyond. And he has just published a new book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.” (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Source: Tech Crunch

Richard Bransons-backed small satellite launch operation Virgin Orbit wants to be the first to dedicate a mission to bringing commercial cube sats to the red planet, the company announced today. Working with Polish satellite company SatRevolution, Virgin Orbit has established a consortium along with a group of Polish academic institutions to jointly work on at least one, and as many as three small satellite launches to Mars, with the first one expected to happen as soon as three years from now.

The consortium is working to follow in the footsteps of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s MarCO mission from 2018, which saw two smaller satellites launched to Mars successfully. The group’s early studies have suggested that even satellites as small as 50 kg (around 110 lbs) or potentially even smaller can provide meaningful and useful research, including imagery collection, from both Mars and its orbiting body Phobos. These satellites could provide key info about the atmospheric composition of Mars, or even scouting for underground water, Virgin Orbit says.

Warsaw-based SatRevolution has experience in the commercial space industry, and in April this year sent Poland’s first commercial nano satellite into orbit. The universities involved, which include the AGH University of Science and Technology, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, and many others, all have experience in space industry research as well. The plan is to launch the spacecraft developed by the universities and SatRevolution aboard Virgin’s LauncherOne rocket, which takes off from a converted 747-400 Virgin has retrofitted for the process.

Virgin Orbit is aiming to have its first orbital rocket launch later this year, and is currently going through the final round of testing before that happens. The company ran a successful drop test earlier this year, during which it let a non-functional rocket fall from the wing of the 747 launcher aircraft in a key test, and it’s been signing contracts to launch from the UK as early as next year.

Source: Tech Crunch

Pinterest is the latest tech company to introduce a “Lite” version of its mobile application to meet the needs of users in emerging markets. With Pinterest Lite, launched on Monday, users will benefit from a faster download and an app that takes up less storage space on their mobile device, the company says.

Pinterest previously offered a Pinterest Lite app on Google Play, but this app was pulled a year ago, according to data from App Annie.

The new Pinterest Lite app is actually Pinterest’s Progressive Web App (PWA) that’s been made available to Google Play users as a download, the company tells TechCrunch.

This is a project that’s been underway for some time, according to a post last year on Pinterest’s Engineering blog. There, the company acknowledged that its mobile web experience had been “terrible” and in need of an update.

In July 2017, Pinterest formed a team to rewrite the mobile web app from scratch as a PWA. It said this would offer a better experience for people in low-bandwidth environments and on limited data plans.

The Pinterest Lite mobile app is available today to Android users in Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Mexico, and clocks in at a tiny 1.4 MB. The main Pinterest app’s size varies by device on Android, but is significantly larger. On iOS, it’s 143.1 MB, for comparison’s sake.

“The goal is to bring Pinterest to everyone around the world so they can discover inspiration related to their interests wherever they might be,” a Pinterest spokesperson said, when reached for comment about the Pinterest Lite launch.

Pinterest is now one of many top publishers who offer a “Lite” version of their flagship apps.

Google has a full suite of lightweight “Go”-branded apps, like Google Go, Gmail Go, Files Go, YouTube Go, Google Maps Go and Google Assistant Go. There’s also Facebook Lite, Instagram Lite, Messenger Lite, Twitter Lite, Uber Lite, Spotify Lite, TikTok Lite, Skype Lite, and LINE Lite, to name a few others. Tinder had also said earlier this year it was working on a Tinder Lite app to better serve the Indian market. That app quietly launched over the summer.

Offering a Lite app is a baseline requirement these days for competing in emerging markets.

Pinterest, in particular, has been working to expand its global footprint, and recently reported international revenue was up 199% to 24M in Q2, and international monthly users were up 38% to 215 million, out of a total of 300 million users. However, the U.S. continues to drive the majority of Pinterest’s revenue, contributing $153M of the total $261M reported in Q2.

Image credit: Pinterest 

Source: Tech Crunch

Homeland Security’s cybersecurity division is pushing to change the law that would allow it to demand information from internet providers that would identify the owners of vulnerable systems, TechCrunch has learned.

Sources familiar with the proposal say the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), founded just less than a year ago, wants the new administrative subpoena powers to lawfully obtain the contact information of the owners of vulnerable devices or systems from internet providers.

CISA, which warns both government and private-sector businesses of security vulnerabilities, privately complained of being unable to warn businesses about security threats because it can’t always identify who owns a vulnerable system.

The new proposal would allow CISA to use its new powers to directly warn businesses of threats to critical devices, such as industrial control systems — typically used in critical infrastructure. These systems are highly sensitive and are increasingly the target of hackers to disrupt real-world infrastructure, like the power grid and water supply.

By law, internet providers are not allowed to share their subscriber data without first receiving a legal demand, such as a subpoena, that can be issued from a federal agency without requiring the approval of a court. Lacking those powers, CISA has to rely on its federal law enforcement partners to use their powers to identify owners of vulnerable systems. Law enforcement can only serve subpoenas during an investigation. But CISA says it is still obliged to warn owners of vulnerable systems, even if there is no investigative interest.

The move is likely to spark fresh debate over how much responsibility the federal government has to proactively warn private-sector businesses about possible vulnerabilities in their defenses.

Jake Williams, founder of Rendition Infosec and former NSA hacker, called the move a “huge power grab,” and warned that the proposed new powers are flawed and could be misused.

“I cannot fathom that this will not be used in a way that lawmakers who are drafting the legislation will not have intended,” he told TechCrunch.

Tarah Wheeler, cybersecurity policy fellow at New America, also said technical challenges of the proposals were flawed.

“When you have traffic originating from a botnet, those IP addresses can be made to appear to be coming from anywhere, which means it can be used as an incredibly thin pretext for the government to knock on someone’s door,” she said.

CISA’s request for administrative subpoena powers is not unusual in government. Many federal departments and divisions use these subpoena powers to obtain information from private businesses. But these powers remain controversial, not least because they can be used to obtain large amounts of information without any judicial oversight.

The FBI uses its own controversial administrative subpoena powers to secretly demand subscriber data from phone companies and tech giants. The courts continue to question the legality of these so-called national security letters (NSLs).

A CISA official speaking to TechCrunch on background said that the proposals, which have already been submitted to Congress, would ensure that businesses would be “more motivated” to take action if the advisory came directly from government. The official said the agency was working with lawmakers to prevent any overreach or potential abuse of the authority.

Adam Comis, a spokesperson for the House Committee on Homeland Security, which oversees CISA, did not return a request for comment.

Got a tip? You can send tips securely over Signal and WhatsApp to +1 646-755-8849. You can also send PGP email with the fingerprint: 4D0E 92F2 E36A EC51 DAAE 5D97 CB8C 15FA EB6C EEA5.

Source: Tech Crunch