Introducing Startup Alley+ at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021

Determined early-stage startup founders (are there really any other kind?) always keep a sharp eye out for advantages that help them build better and faster. Well, heads up folks because this is a brand-new opportunity like no other, and it takes place at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23.

We’re talking about Startup Alley+, a curated experience available to only 50 early-stage startups who exhibit in Startup Alley at Disrupt 2021. All exhibiting startups are eligible, and the TechCrunch team will ultimately select which companies earn a spot. What’s in store for the Startup Alley+ cohort? So glad you asked.

Let’s get the money issue out of the way. You won’t pay anything beyond what you paid for your Startup Alley Pass. Sweet! Now get ready because Startup Alley+ provides plenty of opportunities for exposure and business growth — before Disrupt 2021 even begins.

Get set up for success with access to founder masterclasses. Warm up your pitching arm because you’ll take part in a pitch-off at Extra Crunch Live and receive invaluable feedback. What’s more, TechCrunch will introduce you to top investors within the startup community through our inaugural VC match-making program . A warm introduction beats a cold pitch any day, amirite?

And the perks just keep coming. Startup Alley+ gives participants a healthy headstart on their Disrupt experience. How healthy? It begins in July at TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising, a virtual event the Startup Alley+ cohort attends for free.

With all those experiences under your belt, you’ll be ready to hit the virtual ground running — and reap the rewards — when you set up shop in the Alley at Disrupt.

Don’t forget about the many benefits available to all Startup Alley exhibitors. The virtual nature of Disrupt means thousands of people from around the globe will attend — influencers of every stripe including tech icons, leading founders, top investors, engineers, job seeking talent, and entrepreneurs.

We’ve created more ways to add value and to draw attention to Startup Alley. For instance, every exhibiting startup gets to deliver a 60-second elevator pitch during a breakout feedback session. Your audience? TechCrunch staff and thousands of those Disrupt attendees we mentioned earlier.

We’re also rolling out the Startup Alley Crawl experience again. Every tech category will have an hour-long crawl posted in the agenda. Team TechCrunch will go live from the Disrupt Stage and interview a select number of founders in Startup Alley from each category. This could be you.

As a Startup Alley participant, you might just be selected to be a Startup Battlefield Wild Card. The Startup Battlefield is the stuff of legend. Past winners include the likes of Vurb, Dropbox, Mint and Yammer. Two Startup Alley exhibitors — chosen by the TechCrunch Editorial team — will compete in this year’s Battlefield and have a shot at the $100,000 (equity-free) cash.

Grab every advantage. Don’t miss your chance to participate in Startup Alley+, which kicks off in July. Apply for your Startup Alley Pass now and get ready to make the most of your time at in September at Disrupt 2021.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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Source: Tech Crunch

Quest for prosthetic retinas progresses toward human trials, with a VR assist

An artificial retina would be an enormous boon to the many people with visual impairments, and the possibility is creeping closer to reality year by year. One of the latest advancements takes a different and very promising approach, using tiny dots that convert light to electricity, and virtual reality has helped show that it could be a viable path forward.

These photovoltaic retinal prostheses come from the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, where Diego Ghezzi has been working on the idea for several years now.

Early retinal prosthetics were created decades ago, and the basic idea is as follows: A camera outside the body (on a pair of glasses, for instance) sends a signal over a wire to a tiny microelectrode array, which consists of many tiny electrodes that pierce the nonfunctioning retinal surface and stimulate the working cells directly.

The problems with this are mainly that powering and sending data to the array requires a wire running from outside the eye in — generally speaking a “don’t” when it comes to prosthetics and the body in general. The array itself is also limited in the number of electrodes it can have by the size of each, meaning for many years the effective resolution in the best case scenario was on the order of a few dozen or hundred “pixels.” (The concept doesn’t translate directly because of the way the visual system works.)

Ghezzi’s approach obviates both these problems with the use of photovoltaic materials, which turn light into an electric current. It’s not so different from what happens in a digital camera, except instead of recording the charge as in image, it sends the current into the retina like the powered electrodes did. There’s no need for a wire to relay power or data to the implant, because both are provided by the light shining on it.

Researcher Diego Ghezzi holds a contact lens with photovoltaic dots on it.

Image Credits: Alain Herzog / EPFL

In the case of the EPFL prosthesis, there are thousands of tiny photovoltaic dots, which would in theory be illuminated by a device outside the eye sending light in according to what it detects from a camera. Of course, it’s still an incredibly difficult thing to engineer. The other part of the setup would be a pair of glasses or goggles that both capture an image and project it through the eye onto the implant.

We first heard of this approach back in 2018, and things have changed somewhat since then, as a new paper documents.

“We increased the number of pixels from about 2,300 to 10,500,” explained Ghezzi in an email to TechCrunch. “So now it is difficult to see them individually and they look like a continuous film.”

Of course when those dots are pressed right up against the retina it’s a different story. After all, that’s only 100×100 pixels or so if it were a square — not exactly high definition. But the idea isn’t to replicate human vision, which may be an impossible task to begin with, let alone realistic for anyone’s first shot.

“Technically it is possible to make pixel smaller and denser,” Ghezzi explained. “The problem is that the current generated decreases with the pixel area.”

Image showing a close-up of the photovoltaic dots on the retinal implant, labeled as being about 80 microns across each.

Current decreases with pixel size, and pixel size isn’t exactly large to begin with. Image Credits: Ghezzi et al

So the more you add, the tougher it is to make it work, and there’s also the risk (which they tested) that two adjacent dots will stimulate the same network in the retina. But too few and the image created may not be intelligible to the user. 10,500 sounds like a lot, and it may be enough — but the simple fact is that there’s no data to support that. To start on that the team turned to what may seem like an unlikely medium: VR.

Because the team can’t exactly do a “test” installation of an experimental retinal implant on people to see if it works, they needed another way to tell whether the dimensions and resolution of the device would be sufficient for certain everyday tasks like recognizing objects and letters.

A digitally rendered street scene and distorted monochrome versions below showing various ways of representing it via virtual phosphors.

Image Credits: Jacob Thomas Thorn et al

To do this, they put people in VR environments that were dark except for little simulated “phosphors,” the pinpricks of light they expect to create by stimulating the retina via the implant; Ghezzi likened what people would see to a constellation of bright, shifting stars. They varied the number of phosphors, the area they appear over, and the length of their illumination or “tail” when the image shifted, asking participants how well they could perceive things like a word or scene.

The word "AGREE" rendered in various ways with virtual phosphors.

Image Credits: Jacob Thomas Thorn et al

Their primary finding was that the most important factor was visual angle — the overall size of the area where the image appears. Even a clear image is difficult to understand if it only takes up the very center of your vision, so even if overall clarity suffers it’s better to have a wide field of vision. The robust analysis of the visual system in the brain intuits things like edges and motion even from sparse inputs.

This demonstration showed that the implant’s parameters are theoretically sound and the team can start working toward human trials. That’s not something that can happen in a hurry, and while this approach is very promising compared with earlier, wired ones, it will still be several years even in the best case scenario before it’s possible it could be made widely available. Still, the very prospect of a working retinal implant of this type is an exciting one and we’ll be following it closely.


Source: Tech Crunch

Data shows how few Google Play developers will pay the higher 30% commission after policy change

Google this week announced its was cutting the commissions it charges Android app developers who publish on its Google Play marketplace, following a similar move by Apple last year aimed at fending off antitrust claims. According to Google’s own estimates, 99% of its developers who sell goods and services would see their fees cut in half, as a result of the move that reduces the 30% commission to 15% on the first million dollars a developer earns. Now, data shared by App Annie helps to further illustrate the distribution of earnings on the Google Play Store, as well as how that compares with Apple’s counterpart.

According to App Annie, the vast majority (97.9%) of Google Play publishers made less than $1 million in annual consumer spend in 2020, which allows them to qualify for this reduced commission. But it’s worth noting that the way Google has implemented its new policy is different from Apple, as it will reduce the commission on the “first” $1 million in revenue made during the year — not make $1 million the threshold that triggers a commission increase, like Apple is doing. That means more developers could benefit from Google’s policy change.

It’s interesting to see how few developers across Google Play will ever have to worry about the higher commission bracket. The majority are seeing very small returns from their paid downloads, in-app purchases or subscription offering, the data indicates. This has been an ongoing trend for Android apps, in fact, reflecting Android’s traction in emerging markets where consumers don’t often spend on apps, which has forced many developers to lean on ads in addition to in-app purchases to generate revenues.

Image Credits: App Annie

According to App Annie, 85,381 Google Play developers in 2020 generated less than $100,000 in consumer spend. 3,404 generated $100,000 to $500,000.

Only 568 developers began to even near the $1 million figure, with consumer spend of $500,000 to $750,000 in 2020. Then there were just 359 developers making $750,000 up to that first million.

The groups that would actually see the 30% commission apply to some of their sales were very small.

Just 215 developers saw consumer spend of $1 million to $1.25 million. Only 512 developers made between $1.25 million and $2 million. And then there’s the most profitable group, where 1,308 developers made over $2 million in revenue in 2020.

This distribution pattern where the largest group of developers is making under $100,000 and a sliver of the market was pulling in larger figures, including the over $2 million bracket, was similar to Apple’s App Store in 2020. But in Apple’s case, it sees more developers earning a decent income in the other sub-$1-million brackets than Google Play does.

The reason why Apple may have decided to charge a higher commission for developers making over $1 million is also reflected in these charts. Apple simply has more developers who qualify by making over $1 million per year. (On iOS, 3,611 developers make $1 million or more on the App Store versus 2,035 developers on Google Play).

Image Credits: App Annie

In other words, these policy changes help a large majority of mobile app developers by allowing them to take home more money, and they give Apple and Google a good way to demonstrate to regulators that they’re not wielding their market power against the “little guy.”

For example, App Annie says that publishers making up to $1 million in consumer spend only comprised 5% of total Google Play consumer spend in 2020, even though 94% of Google Play apps offer some sort of in-app purchase mechanism.

But ultimately, the new policies have far less impact on the revenue the platforms themselves are pulling in via commissions. However, Google’s rule makes it simpler and more fair for developers who are still trying to grow their businesses despite crossing the $1 million threshold.


Source: Tech Crunch

MaaS transit: The business of mobility as a service

In 2019, St. Louis Metro Transit was struggling to keep customers. Uber and Lyft, along with dockless shared bikes and scooters, had flooded streets, causing ridership to fall more than 7% in a single year.

The agency didn’t try to fight for attention. Instead, it embraced its competitors.

Metro Transit dropped its internal trip-planning app, which had been developed with the Trapeze Group and directed riders to Transit, a private third-party app that offers mapping and real-time transit data in more than 200 cities. That app also included micromobility and ride-hailing information, allowing customers to not just look up bus schedules, but see how they might get to and from stops — or ignore the bus altogether.

The following year, Metro Transit partnered with mobile ticketing company Masabi and added a payment option on some bus routes. Now, the agency is planning an all-in-one app — via third-party providers Transit and Masabi — where customers could plan and book end-to-end trips across trains, buses, bikes, scooters and taxis.

“What we do best is transporting large volumes of people on vehicles and managing mass transit,” said Metro Transit executive director Jessica Mefford-Miller. “On the software side, there are a lot of players out there doing great stuff that can help us meet our customers where they are and make trip planning as easy as possible.”

St. Louis Metro Transit isn’t an outlier. As transit agencies seek to win back riders, a flurry of platforms — some backed by giants like Uber, Intel and BMW — are offering new technology partnerships. Whether it’s bundling bookings, payments or just trip planning, startups are selling these mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) offerings as a lifeline to make transit agencies the backbone of urban mobility.

Whether it’s bundling bookings, payments or just trip planning, startups are selling mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) offerings as a lifeline to make transit agencies the backbone of urban mobility.

Third-party platforms have become more appealing to transit agencies as they scramble to keep buses, trains and rail full of customers. According to the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), ridership and total miles traveled has declined since 2014, including a 2.5% drop from 2017 to 2018. The COVID-19 pandemic could accelerate this trend as more people continue working from home or shy away from crowding into buses and trains.

“This is like Expedia, the idea of seeing multiple airlines in one place to comparison shop,” said Regina Clewlow, CEO of transportation management firm Populus. “A lot of operators are looking at the question of whether that would give them more rides.”

But that the private growth could come at a cost, potentially injecting private concerns into what should be a public good, Metro Transit’s Mefford-Miller cautioned.

“If we let the market handle this planning on its own, a company might only do it for someone with a digital device or a bank account or only help people who don’t need special accommodation,” Mefford-Miller said. “That’s why we have as an underpinning an equitable and accessible system. It’s the underpinning before we choose any tools we use.”

The players

Amid the swarm of new startups there are a few giants. One of the biggest established players is Cubic Corp., a San Diego-based defense and public transportation company. The firm already controls payments and back-end software for hundreds of transit agencies, including in Chicago, New York and San Francisco, and in January launched a suite of new products under the brand name Umo to expand their offerings.

The package includes a customer-facing multimodal app, a fare collection platform, a contactless payment system, a rewards program, a behind-the-scenes management platform and a MaaS marketplace for public and private offerings. Mick Spiers, general manager of Umo, said the goal is to offer a “connected, integrated journey.”

“We’re uniquely placed as an independent, trusted third party that can be the data broker for a journey focused around the needs of the user,” Spiers added. “The journey we create has no commercial interest for us.”


Source: Tech Crunch

BMW takes the wraps off the i4, its first all-electric sedan

BMW plans to have 25 electrified cars in its lineup by 2025 and it’s taking a few more steps in this direction this year with the launch of the all-electric iX SUV and the i4 sedan. Today, for the first time, the German automaker shared a few more details of what we can expect from the i4, its first fully-electric sedan, in addition to sharing the first exterior shots of the new model.

At the top end, the i4 will have a power output of 390kW / 530HP. Going from zero to 100km/h will take four seconds.

BMW promises up to a 300 miles range, according to its own preliminary tests based on the EPA’s test procedures. Enough to go from L.A. to Las Vegas. That’s the same range as the iX will be able to cover on a single charge and a slight increase in horsepower compared to BMW’s new SUV. And while that range is less than what Tesla and some other competitors can offer, it’s still more than what’s possible with comparable all-electric Porsche and Audi models like the eTaycan and e-tron GT, which are in the lower 200s.

Image Credits: BMW

“With its sporty looks, best in class driving dynamics and zero local emissions, the BMW i4 is a true BMW. It makes the heart of the BMW brand now beat fully electric,” said Pieter Nota, member of the Board of Management of BMW AG responsible for Customer, Brands, Sales.

For now, we don’t have any pricing details or additional specs for the i4. It will become available later this year, so we’ll likely see more details in the summer.

“The iX is purpose-built, it’s spectacular and it’s a completely new BMW X product,” Frank Weber, BMW’s head of development, said at a press event earlier this week. “But what people are longing for is to see that we have a sport sedan that is fully electric. […] And the i4 has everything it takes to have a real sporty sedan from BMW that is fully electric.”

And indeed, unlike the somewhat quirky i3, BMW’s first all-electric car, the i4 is a standard, four-door sedan (with real passenger doors, unlike the i3) — something that buyers in the market for a sporty yet roomy electric car from BMW in the spirit of the existing 4-series will likely appreciate.

Earlier this week, BMW also announced version 8 of its iDrive operating system, which will feature a new dashboard layout and visual design, with two curved screens. It will make its debut in the i4 and iX.


Source: Tech Crunch

Okay, the GPT-3 hype seems pretty reasonable

This morning TechCrunch covered an interesting round for Copy.ai, a startup that employs GPT-3 to help other companies with their writing projects. GPT-3, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, is a piece of AI from the OpenAI group that takes text from the user, and writes a lot more for them.

As part of the process of covering the Copy.ai round, I got caught up in the idea of AI-powered writing. I’ve long been more curious than afraid of automated writing. So when the Copy team described their very positive impressions of the GPT-3 AI writing tool to TechCrunch during an interview, I was intrigued.

To scratch this newly-formed itch, I doodled around this morning with a competitor of sorts to the Copy team , Headlime. And, freaking heck am I am impressed at what folks have managed to build around the GPT-3 technology.

Sure, GPT-3 can add words to a prompt. But the technology can do a lot more than that. The GPT-3-powered Headlime managed to not only write some medium-good stuff for me, but also managed bring in concepts concerning my reporting beat that were in my head but not in the prompts I provided.

I can’t do better than just show you what I mean. So, here’s what happened when I used Headlime for the first time, sans help.

Here’s the first thing that Headlime showed me, a language selector and a request for a description of the post that I wanted to write. I decided to push the system a bit by just telling it about a piece I need to write in light of today’s market action:

Ha ha, I thought, that will kick it in the teeth and I, a biped of intelligent meat wrapped around some calcium sticks, will feel grossly superior to the computer player. I hit go and then realized that I actually had to provide 500 characters of stuff, so I rambled for a bit to fill in required length:

Time for the next step! Hitting the button brought up a list of possible headlines for the post I was helping create, which were honestly not terrible:

Fair enough, yeah? At this point I was starting to become impressed.

I selected the first headline as it was my favorite and moved along. Next came the work to get an intro put together for the post, a process that involved the strenuous work of clicking a button:

Here are the options proffered:

Again, not bad.

What struck me about these are not merely minor variations on each other. They are structured differently, taking various angles on what I was halfway talking about in the 500 characters of bilge I had fed into the system. I was starting to wish that I had given GPT-3 a bit more to work with up top, as it was trying its best after I had clearly not.

Intro selected, I was brought into a CMS of sorts, where our selected bits were included, and your humble servant was asked to do a bit more writing.

I was happy to oblige, only for the system to stop me and offer to take over:

Having precisely no idea what a credit is, or what two of them cost as I was on a free trial of sorts, I hit the “Write for me” button. This is what came out:

Look at how it finished that sentence I started, even after I used em-dashes! The software gets the next sentence backwards, but is right back on the horse afterwards talking about how higher interest rates make exotic investment classes like venture capital less attractive! I was gobsmacked.

I will keep playing with the tech and the various software wrappers that are being built to productize GPT-3. More notes to come. But I wanted to pause and share my initial delight. This is cool. I can’t recall the last time that technology actually shocked me. But, well played GPT-3, you’re amazing.

 

 


Source: Tech Crunch

Fraud prevention platform Seon raises a $12M Series A round led by Creandum

Seon, which lets online businesses fight online fraud like fake accounts has raised a $12 million Series A round led by Creandum, with participation from PortfoLion, part of OTP Bank. The funding appears to be one of Hungary’s larger series A rounds to date.
 
Seon is a fraud-detection startup that establishes a customers’ ‘digital footprint’ in order to weed out false accounts and thus prevent fraudulent transactions. Clients include Patreon, AirFrance, Rivalry and Ladbrokes Launched in 2017, the company claims to bave been profitable since the end of 2019, after experiencing growth through working with neobanks, esports, gaming, Forex, and crypto trading throughout the rapid digitization brought on by the pandemic.

SEON’s CEO and Founder, Tamas Kadar, said in a statement: “We’re extremely pleased to have completed our latest funding round, led by Creandum, joining its exciting tech portfolio. We feel we have found a like-minded investor to work closely with to pursue the significant global opportunity for our business as we continue to democratize fraud fighting.”
 
Simon Schmincke, general partner at Creandum, said: “At Creandum, we believe cybercrime will be one of the most serious threats of the 21st century. With SEON, we’ve found an anti-fraud solution that’s effective, affordable, flexible, intuitive, and clearly proves its ROI.”
 
Gábor Pozsonyi, partner at PortfoLion Capital Partners, added: “Seon is a fundamentally useful brand: it offers a solution to one of the greatest challenges of digitalization, not only saving hundreds of millions of euros for its partners but making the internet a safer place.”

SEON are seen as competing with Emailage, Iovation, Threatmetrix. However, SEON’s thesis is that social media is a great proxy of a legitimate user vs bot/fake fraudster, so it looks heavily at social accounts to weed out fraudsters.

As part of the funding round, Seon has brought on board the following investors as shareholders: N26 founders, Maximilian Tayenthal and Valentin Stalf; SumUp founders Stefan Jeschonnek and Jan Deepen; Tide CEO Laurence Krieger; Revolut ex-CFO Peter O’Higgins; iZettle ex-chief Product Officer Leo Nilsson; Onfido cofounder Eamon Jubawy, and ComplyAdvantage founder Charlie Delingpole.


Source: Tech Crunch

To solve all the small things, look to everyday Little AI

In a recent LinkedIn survey, I asked product and software developers if and how they were making their software smarter. A surprising 57% cited A/B testing, while another 50% reported they were still swinging from decision trees.

Why are developers still solving everyday pain points with these manual, archaic processes, as opposed to employing “Little AI”? There are millions of everyday use cases for AI, where technology is empowered to learn and decide on a course of action that offers the best outcome for consumers and companies alike. The problem is that the Big AI we’re used to has a lot of challenges that make it inaccessible for developers to employ for tasks that’d benefit from everyday AI.

There are millions of everyday use cases for AI, where technology is empowered to learn and decide on a course of action that offers the best outcome for consumers and companies alike.

What we’re missing

Take this article you’re reading right now. If TechCrunch let loose a Little AI  — essentially empowered machine learning — it could learn you prefer to read short, newsworthy articles in the morning and longer thought pieces at night. That learning informs a personalized home page, presenting you with bullet points upon awakening and feature stories at night — all without you having to laboriously enter your preferences or respond to pop-up surveys.

Little AI also learns that what your VC friend wants to see on their screen first thing is recent series funding announcements. A truly personalized experience is not only our expectation, it is the core component of the relationship between us and our content providers. And yet, it’s missing.

Let’s raise the stakes. There are multiple players in the split-pay space. A sprinkle of Little AI can teach a fintech provider that one consumer likes to finish paying off an item in less than six months and never wants any outstanding payment to exceed $250. It can also learn that they are open to revolving credit/product offers for an experience-related purchase above $1,500. This type of truly personalized financing enables both the consumer and merchant to benefit from a completed sale while lowering the risk of default to the credit provider.

Travel will be coming back in a big way, with more deals than ever. Little AI can jump in and learn how to make that experience far easier for consumers and far more successful for travel providers. Rather than showing consumers every single deal for every single location, it can take personal preferences into account.


Source: Tech Crunch

Lucid Motors sees a second life for its EV batteries in energy storage

Lucid Motors has designed the battery packs in its luxury electric vehicle for two lives. The company, which is already experimenting with energy storage systems for commercial and residential customers, is also eyeing ways to repurpose batteries from its electric vehicles.

While Lucid is still years from having to contend with a large number of used batteries —  its first EV, the luxury Lucid Air sedan, isn’t coming to market until the second half of 2021 — the company is already planning how to give them a second life them in a yet-to-be-launched energy storage business.

The battery-cell modules that power Lucid’s vehicles are identical to the ones that will be used for energy storage, making them well-suited for “second-life” purposes, according to the company. The company has already constructed a prototype of a 300-kilowatt hour stationary battery storage system at its engineering lab, Lucid’s Chief Engineer and Senior VP of Product Eric Bach told TechCrunch. The batteries in that system are new, but there is “no technical limitation” that would prevent Lucid from swapping them out with used batteries, Bach said. While Lucid CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson has previously discussed plans to eventually build energy storage systems like Tesla that uses new batteries, this is the first time the company has talked about second-life applications for the product. 

Batteries typically retain a charging capacity of around 70% once they’re removed from EVs, which means they potentially have another decade of useful life. Automakers like General Motors, Ford Motor, and Audi AG have already initiated second-life pilot projects aimed at extracting that remaining value. 

Bach explained the company will likely retrieve batteries used in Lucid EVs after they reach the end of their useful life through its dedicated service centers or when customers trade in their vehicles. Once batteries are returned to Lucid, the company would need to harvest the modules from the packs and run a quality check on them. Lucid’s vehicles have built-in sensors that provide data on each of its cars from the battery packs down to the module level, Bach said, which will come in handy when determining the health of each module. After physical testing, the modules could be ready to be placed in an outgoing product. 

Storage systems do contain some additional components. In a home system, that may include a DC-to-AC inverter, a cooling system and safety switches. The actual battery will remain consistent across Lucid’s products.   

Lucid hasn’t determined how it will distribute the second-life batteries between home and industrial applications.

“Personally, I feel in an industrial application, using these [second-life] modules would be more appropriate and easier because there, the key metric is really just dollars per kilowatt hour,” Bach said.

In instances where a Lucid vehicle ends up at a car dismantler, Bach suggested there may be an opportunity to incentivize the dismantler to feed the battery packs back to the company. Even if that doesn’t happen, as the price of EV battery raw materials continues to rise, dismantlers will likely make their own business of selling battery packs to companies or recyclers. 

At this point – with no product yet on the market and with an expectation that it will be low- to mid-volume – Lucid has not started branching out into recycling materials itself, he said. For the moment, Lucid is leaving recycling operations to its battery cell suppliers, like South Korea-based LG Chem.

“But in the long run, I mean, we’re just at the start of our journey [. . .] and I can envision that in multiple years we will look into cell manufacturing ourselves as well as the full value chain for everything that’s needed to make the applicable energy storage devices,” Bach said. “So in the future, absolutely it makes a lot of sense as the volume goes up, you need to try to contain more of the supply chain and that goes back into a sustainable method of harvesting the raw materials.”

Bach said the company is laser-focused on the Lucid Air and the public may be a few years out from seeing a Lucid home battery system. Until then, the Lucid Air will come equipped with bidirectional charging capabilities, meaning the customer will be able to feed the power from her car into her house. 

“Essentially, that is the first home battery system that we will have already,” Bach said.

It’s unclear what resources — in terms of people and capital — Lucid is putting towards an energy storage business. Such details are likely to remain scant until after the company officially becomes a publicly traded company. In March, Lucid Motors announced it had reached an agreement to become a publicly traded company through a merger with special-purpose acquisition company Churchill Capital IV Corp., in what was considered the largest deal yet between a blank-check company and an electric vehicle startup.

The combined company, in which Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund will continue to be the largest shareholder, will have a transaction equity value of $11.75 billion. Private investment in the public equity deal is priced at $15 a share, putting the implied pro-forma equity value at $24 billion.

The funding will be used to bring the Lucid Air and an SUV to market as well as to expand its factory in Arizona, Lucid CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson previously told TechCrunch. The company plans to expand the factory over another three phases in the coming years to have the capacity to produce 365,000 units per year at scale. The initial phase of the $700 million factory was completed late last year and will have the capacity to produce 30,000 vehicles a year.


Source: Tech Crunch

Three energy-innovation takeaways from Texas’ deep freeze

Individual solutions to the collective crisis of climate change abound: backup diesel generators, Tesla powerwalls, “prepper” shelters. However, the infrastructure that our modern civilization relies on is interconnected and interdependent — energy, transportation, food, water and waste systems are all vulnerable in climate-driven emergencies. No one solution alone and in isolation will be the salvation to our energy infrastructure crisis.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the California wildfires last year, and the recent deep freeze in Texas, the majority of the American public has not only realized how vulnerable infrastructure is, but also how critical it is to properly regulate it and invest in its resilience.

What is needed now is a mindset shift in how we think about infrastructure. Specifically, how we price risk, how we value maintenance, and how we make policy that is aligned with our climate reality. The extreme cold weather in Texas wreaked havoc on electric and gas infrastructure that was not prepared for unusually cold weather events. If we continue to operate without an urgent (bipartisan?) investment in infrastructure, especially as extreme weather becomes the norm, this tragic trend will only continue (with frontline communities bearing a disproportionately high burden).

A month after Texas’ record-breaking storm, attention is rightly focused on helping the millions of residents putting their lives back together. But as we look toward the near-term future and get a better picture of the electric mobility tipping point on the horizon, past-due action to reform our nation’s energy infrastructure and utilities must take precedence.

Emphasize energy storage

Seventy-five percent of Texas’ electricity is generated from fossil fuels and uranium, and about 80% of the power outages in Texas were caused by these systems. The state and the U.S. are overly dependent on outdated energy generation, transmission and distribution technologies. As the price of energy storage is expected to drop to $75/kWh by 2030, more emphasis needs to be placed on “demand-side management” and distributed energy resources that support the grid, rather than trying to supplant it. By pooling and aggregating small-scale clean energy generation sources and customer-sited storage, 2021 can be the year that “virtual power plants” realize their full potential.

Policymakers would do well to mandate new incentives and rebates to support new and emerging distributed energy resources installed on the customers’ side of the utility meter, such as California’s Self-Generation Incentive Program.

Invest in workforce development

For the energy transition to succeed, workforce development will need to be a central component. As we shift from coal, oil and gas to clean energy sources, businesses and governments — from the federal to the city level — should invest in retraining workers into well-paying jobs across emerging verticals, like solar, electric vehicles and battery storage. In energy efficiency (the lowest-hanging fruit of the energy transition), cities should seize the opportunity to tie equity-based workforce development programs to real estate energy benchmarking requirements.

These policies will not only boost the efficiency of our energy systems and the viability of our aging building stock, creating a more productive economy but will also lead to job growth and expertise in a growth industry of the 21st century. According to analysis from Rewiring America, an aggressive national commitment to decarbonization could yield 25 million good-paying jobs over the next 15 years.

Build microgrids for reliability

Microgrids can connect and disconnect from the grid. By operating on normal “blue-sky” operating days as well as during emergencies, microgrids provide uninterrupted power when the grid goes down — and reduce grid constraints and energy costs when grid-connected. Previously the sole domain of military bases and universities, microgrids are growing 15% annually, reaching an $18 billion market in the U.S. by 2022.

For grid resiliency and reliable power supply, there is no better solution than community-scale microgrids that connect critical infrastructure facilities with nearby residential and commercial loads. Funding feasibility studies and audit-grade designs — so that communities have zero-cost but high-quality pathways to constructable projects, as New York State did with the NY Prize initiative — is a proven way to involve communities in their energy planning and engage the private sector in building low-carbon resilient energy systems.

Unpredictability and complexity are quickening, and technology has its place, but not simply as an individual safeguard or false security blanket. Instead, technology should be used to better calculate risk, increase system resilience, improve infrastructure durability, and strengthen the bonds between people in a community both during and in between emergencies.


Source: Tech Crunch