Month: May 2021

Besides a passion for progress in the mobility space, what do Toyota AI Ventures’ Jim Adler, May Mobility’s Nina Grooms Lee and May’s Edwin Olson have in common?

All three of them are joining us on an upcoming episode of Extra Crunch Live. The show goes down on May 12 at 3pm ET/noon PT. Register here for free!

May Mobility is one the most exciting companies to enter the transportation space in the past decade. The autonomous shuttle company has a fleet of autonomous low-speed shuttles spread out between Detroit, Grand Rapids and Providence. Recently, May launched a Lexus-based autonomous shuttle. The company has raised $83.6 million in funding, including a $50 million Series B led by Toyota Motor Corp.

Which brings us this episode of Extra Crunch Live.

Toyota AI Ventures Founding Managing Director Jim Adler will sit down with May Mobility Chief Product Officer Nina Grooms Lee and May co-founder and CEO Edwin Olson to discuss how that Series B deal came about. We’ll talk about what made May stand out to Toyota, and vice versa, and how the teams have worked together since.

We’ll also talk about what to expect out of the ever-changing and growing mobility industry.

Following the interview, Grooms Lee, Olson and Adler will weigh in on startup pitches from the audience. Yup, that’s right. Our ECL audience will once again have the chance to pitch our seasoned tech professionals. Attendees can virtually “raise their hand” as soon as our virtual doors open and throw their hat in the ring for an opportunity to make a 2-minute elevator pitch. Imagine running into a VC or potential customer at a tech conference like Disrupt or bumping into them at a park. As such, no visual aids are allowed, including decks, videos, demoes, etc. Excited? Smash this link to register for free!

Extra Crunch Live goes down every Wednesday at 3pm ET/noon PT and is accessible to anyone and everyone. However, on-demand access to the content is reserved exclusively for Extra Crunch members. If you’re not yet a member, what are you waiting for?

Source: Tech Crunch

“I feel the need — the need for speed.” That could be the official mobility startup founder credo, amirite? Speed and agility are important, but don’t move so quickly that you miss the chance to save $100 on a pass to TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 on June 9.

We’ve extended our early-bird price for just one more day. Slow your EV roll, reroute your autonomous vehicle or dock your scooter just long enough to buy a pass before the extended deadline expires on May 7, at 11:59 pm (PT).

TC Sessions: Mobility is where you’ll learn about the latest trends and tech advancements across the mobility spectrum — autonomous trucks, AI, EVs, the future of flight, regulatory issues, micromobility, robotics and more — from the brightest minds, makers and investors around the world.

Don’t just take our word for it. Here are what past attendees shared with us about their TC Sessions: Mobility experience:

“The virtual dynamic gave the conference a relaxed, conversational vibe. The speakers and TechCrunch editors were more accessible, and that was a welcome surprise.” — Rachael Wilcox, creative producer, Volvo Cars.

“TC Sessions: Mobility exceeded my expectations in terms of useful content. Every panel discussion I attended, every interaction I had was relevant to my work or to my daily life — because we don’t stop living at 5 pm.” — Jens Lehmann, technical lead and product manager, SAP.

“People want to be around what’s interesting and learn what trends and issues they need to pay attention to. Even large companies like GM and Ford were there, because they’re starting to see the trend move toward mobility. They want to learn from the experts, and TC Sessions: Mobility has all the experts.” — Melika Jahangiri, vice president at Wunder Mobility.

Did someone say experts? Here are just a few of the leading voices in the mobility ecosystem who will offer their invaluable insight and advice:

• Kameale Terry, co-founder and CEO at ChargerHelp! Inc.
• Ahti Heinla, co-founder, CEO and CTO at Starship Technologies
• Clara Brenner, co-founder and managing partner at Urban Innovation Fund

Check the event agenda and start planning your schedule now. Your pass includes both livestream and video-on-demand, so you won’t miss a minute of startup action.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 takes place on June 9, and you have just one last shot to save $100 on the price of admission. Buy your pass before the price goes up and the savings disappear on May 7, at 11:59 pm (PT).

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

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Source: Tech Crunch

Credit Karma Money, a new checking and savings account from the company best known for its credit monitoring service, recently launched a significant new feature. Called Instant Karma, the program rewards users by randomly refunding purchases. So far, since launching the feature, Credit Karma says it has rewarded 100,000 transactions, worth $5 million.

I spoke to Poulomi Damany, general manager at Credit Karma, who said the idea behind Credit Karma Money is to “change people’s relationship with money.” Credit Karma Instant Karma is an extension of that goal.

The process works differently from other cash-back offers. For one, this product is linked to a debt card rather than a credit card. Credit Karma Product Manger Kyle Thibaut says that’s by design, as their target demographic tends to stay away from credit cards. Second, the refund, though random, happens instantly. Swipe your card at a grocery store, and if selected, the money spent on the transaction is refunded instantly.

“Gen Z do not necessarily like credit cards,” Thibaut said. “When you talk to them, they like debit cards and debit cards are the way they spend. Debit card usage is higher than credit cards in the U.S., and it’s actually growing while credit card usage is declining.”

According to Damany and Thibaut, a large portion of Credit Karma’s 110 million members are millennials and this product, along with Credit Karma Money, are targeted at this demographic. They say this model lines up better with the spending habits of this generation, who are generally not optimizing their spending to maximize credit card rewards.

At this time, the company is unwilling to share user numbers for Credit Karma Money and the amount of users who received a refund from Instant Karma. The company says it is saving those numbers for an upcoming earnings release — Credit Karma is owned by TurboTax maker, Intuit.

Update: A previous version of this article stated that Instant Karma works with Credit Karma’s savings account. The company says the programs are different, and the program for the saving’s account is being renamed Savings Boost.

Source: Tech Crunch

David Swensen, among the most highly regarded money managers in the world after growing Yale’s endowment from $1 billion when he joined as a 31-year-old former grad student of the school to the second-largest school endowment in the country after Harvard, has passed away at age 67. The cause was cancer, which Swensen had been battling since first being diagnosed in 2012.

The news is likely sending shockwaves and sadness throughout endowment offices around the country, largely because so many chief investment officers admired Swensen, who pulled the school into non-traditional asset classes like hedge funds, private equity, venture funds, and real estate, but also because many learned from working with him directly. As a new WSJ piece about his death notes, Princeton’s endowment chief for the past 26 years, Andrew Golden, spent five years as a senior associate in Yale’s investment office in the 1980s, yet it formed him form a blueprint for his career. As he told the outlet in 2017, “90% of my good ideas on how to organize the office and develop a culture I’ve stolen from Yale.”

The University of Pennsylvania, Bowdoin College, Wesleyan University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have also recruited Swensen protégés over the years. Robert Wallace, who has headed up the Stanford Management Company since 2015, is another former Yale investment manager.

Indeed, in 2015, wealth management recruiter David Barrett told the WSJ that when hiring an investment chief, wealthy universities were interested in more than an Ivy League pedigree. Specifically, he said, their top question was: “Is there anyone at Yale?”

Even as he battled cancer, Swensen was pulling the industry in a new direction as recently as last fall, telling the firms that manage the school’s money that they risked losing the school’s backing if they didn’t hire more women and minorities into their ranks — and keep them there.

It was a decision that was years in the making, he suggested last fall, telling the Journal that he’d held off on any kind of systematic effort relating to diversity because he long believed there existed an insufficient pipeline of diverse candidates; he said the Black Lives Matter movement helped him to recognize that far more needed to be done — and that Yale could do nothing or that it could be part of the solution.

Source: Tech Crunch

Of the 22 million comments submitted to the FCC regarding 2017’s controversial rollback of net neutrality, some 18 million were fake, an investigation by the New York Attorney General’s office has found. The broadband industry funded the fraudulent creation of about 8.5 million of those, while a 19-year-old college student submitted 7.7 million, and the remainder came from unknown but spurious sources.

The damning report, issued today, is the result of years of work; it set up a tip line early on so people could report fraudulent comments, and no doubt received plenty, as people were already independently finding themselves, dead relatives, and other obviously fake submissions among the record.

It turns out that a huge number of these comments were paid for by a consortium of broadband companies called Broadband for America, which laid out about $4.2 million for the purpose. They contracted with several “lead generator” companies, the kind of shady operations that offer you free trials of “male enhancement pills” or the like if you fill out a form — in this case, asking the person to write an anti-net-neutrality comment.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the lead generation companies didn’t even bother plying their shady trade in what passes for an honest way; instead they fabricated the lists and comments with years-old data and in one case with identities stolen in a major data breach. The practice was near universal:

In all, six lead generators funded by the broadband industry engaged in fraud. As a result, nearly every comment and message the broadband industry submitted to the FCC and Congress was fake, signed using the names and addresses of millions of individuals without their knowledge or consent.

The broadband companies are off the hook on a technicality, since they were careful to firewall themselves from the practices of those they were contracting with, even though the record shows it was plain that the information being collected and used was fraudulent. But because the actions were, ostensibly, independently taken by the enterprising lead generators, the buck stops there.

Notably, these scams were also involved in more than a hundred other advocacy campaigns, including submitting over a million fake comments for an EPA proceeding and millions of other letters and digital comments.

The wholesale undermining of the processes of government earned fines of $3.7M, $550K, and $150K for Fluent Inc, React2Media, and Opt-Intelligence respectively. There are also “comprehensive reforms” imposed on them, though it may be best not to expect much from those.

Internet rights advocacy organization Fight for the Future issued a king-size “I told you so” noting that they had flagged this process at the time and helped bring it to the attention of both government officials and ordinary folks.

Another 7.7 million fake comments were submitted by a single person, a California college student who simply combined a fake name generation site with disposable email service to provide plausible identities. The person automated an individual comment submission process, and somehow the FCC’s systems didn’t flag it. Another unknown person used similar means to submit another 1.6 million fake comments.

Acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement that “Today’s report demonstrates how the record informing the FCC’s net neutrality repeal was flooded with fraud. This was troubling at the time because even then the widespread problems with the record were apparent. We have to learn from these lessons and improve because the public deserves an open and fair opportunity to tell Washington what they think about the policies that affect their lives.”

Indeed at the time Rosenworcel suggested delaying the vote, joining many in the country who felt the scale of the shenanigans warranted further investigation — but then-Chairman Ajit Pai brushed aside their concerns, one of many decisions that have considerably tarnished his legacy.

Altogether it’s a pretty sad situation, and the broadband companies and their lobbyists get off without so much as a slap on the wrist. The NY AG report has a variety of recommendations, some of which no doubt have already been implemented or suggested as the FCC’s comment debacle became clear, but the bad guys definitely won this time.

Source: Tech Crunch

Orbital launch company Virgin Orbit has scheduled its next mission to space.

Virgin Orbit will be returning its LauncherOne rocket to orbit in June to deliver payloads for the U.S. Department of Defense Space Test Program, SatRevolution, and the Royal Netherlands Air Force.

The manifest includes three CubeSat satellites as part of the DoD’s Rapid Agile Launch Initiative; a CubeSat satellite called BRIK II, Norway’s first military satellite to go to space; and two optical imaging satellites from SatRevolution for Earth observation. DoD awarded the launch to Virgin Orbit’s defense-focused subsidiary VOX Space last April.

LauncherOne will take its payload to a target orbit of around 310 miles above Earth.

This will be the LauncherOne’s first take-off since a demonstration mission in January, during which the LauncherOne carried satellites to low Earth orbit on behalf of NASA. That most recent demonstration was the first time Virgin Orbit proved that its unique hybrid aircraft/orbital rocket system actually works. The first try, which took place in May of last year, ended after the rocket initiated an automatic safety shutdown after detaching from the Boeing 747 that takes it to launch altitude.

The mission will be conducted from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California on a yet-to-be-announced date in June. The rocket will be shipped out to the Mojave site “in the coming days” for prelaunch operations, the company said. Virgin Orbit will offer a public livestream of the mission on its website.

Virgin Orbit is part of a small cohort of private orbital launch companies that have actually sent payloads to space. As opposed to providers like SpaceX, which uses massive rockets similar to legacy designs from agencies like NASA, LauncherOne is essentially a 747 that’s been retrofitted with a rocket. Besides being smaller and able to take off from traditional airplane runways, the 747 saves on costs by being completely reusable.

Virgin Orbit was spun out of Virgin Galactic in 2017, with the latter focusing exclusively on commercial human spaceflight services. In homage to its beginnings as a humble record company, the mission has been christened “Tubular Bells, Part One,” so named after the first track on the first album ever released by Virgin Records.

Source: Tech Crunch

Chinese electric vehicle maker Nio has chosen a Norway — an EV hotspot — for its first foray into international markets. Nio Norway will offer a European version of ES8, Nio’s flagship electric SUV, to Norwegian customers from September this year. The ET7 sedan will follow in 2022.

“The decision to have Norway as our first destination overseas is backed by long-term thinking,” Nio founder William Li explained at an event Thursday. “Norway is the most EV-friendly company.” Among the European countries, Norway is the biggest adopter of battery electric vehicles. The company’s relationship with Norway stretches back to 2018 when Norges Bank, the country’s sovereign fund, gave the automaker “critical support” during its initial public offering, Li said at the event. Nio signed a strategic partnership agreement with the Norwegian EV Association, also in 2018.

That high EV adoption rate also means Nio will be making its pitch to a growing consumer base of savvy EV owners. In Norway, Nio will face competition from Chinese automakers like XPeng, international rivals Tesla and European automakers such as Volkswagen and Audi.

In addition to vehicle sales, the company also detailed plans to open dedicated service centers, vehicle charging stations and its Nio Power Swap battery swapping stations to Norway. The company aims to build four battery swapping stations around Oslo by the end of 2021, with additional swapping stations coming to the Norwegian cities Bergen, Trondheim, Stavanger and Kristiansand in 2022. Nio’s Norway team is composed of around 15 people, but that number is expected to grow to around 50 by the end of 2021, according to the company.

The Chinese automaker has had a slow start since its founding in 2014, but started gaining ground in the second half of 2020 through the latest quarter. Nio reported deliveries of 20,060 vehicles in the first quarter, a 422.7% jump from the same period last year when COVID-19 was busy upending the economy on a global scale. Sales in the first quarter of 2021 were also 15.6% higher from the fourth quarter. It has delivered 102,000 vehicles to date. These deliveries helped the company increase its vehicle sales by 489% compared to the first quarter of 2019.

Still, Nio is losing money, albeit the gap between revenues and net loss continues to narrow.

The boost in sales was likely due in part to the January debut of the ET7, its flagship electric sedan and the first vehicle model to be fitted with its so-called “Nio Autonomous Driving” software. The company has been an outlier when it comes to charging, adopting a battery swap option in addition to traditional plug and charge stations. Nio has already completed more than 2.4 million swaps for Chinese users, Li said – a number that’s growing  by 10,000 every day. Last August, the company also debuted its “battery-as-a-service” purchasing option, which allows drivers to lease the battery from the company and only purchase the vehicle.

Source: Tech Crunch

Months after Apple’s App Store introduced privacy labels for apps, Google announced its own mobile app marketplace, Google Play, will follow suit. The company today pre-announced its plans to introduce a new “safety” section in Google Play, rolling out next year, which will require app developers to share what sort of data their apps collect, how it’s stored, and how it’s used.

For example, developers will need to share what sort of personal information their apps collect, like users’ names or emails, and whether it collects information from the phone, like the user’s precise location, their media files or contacts. Apps will also need to explain how the app uses that information — for example, for enhancing the app’s functionality or for personalization purposes.

Developers who already adhere to specific security and privacy practices will additionally be able to highlight that in their app listing. On this front, Google says it will add new elements that detail whether the app uses security practices like data encryption; if the app follows Google’s Families policy, related to child safety; if the app’s safety section has been verified by an independent third party; whether the app needs data to function or allows users to choose whether or not share data; and whether the developer agrees to delete user data when a user uninstalls the app in question.

Apps will also be required to provide their privacy policies.

While clearly inspired by Apple’s privacy labels, there are several key differences. Apple’s labels focus on what data is being collected for tracking purposes and what’s linked to the end user. Google’s additions seem to be more about whether or not you can trust the data being collected is being handled responsibility, by allowing the developer to showcase if they follow best practices around data security, for instance. It also gives the developer a way to make a case for why it’s collecting data right on the listing page itself. (Apple’s “ask to track” pop-ups on iOS now force developers to beg inside their apps for access user data).

Another interesting addition is that Google will allow the app data labels to be independently verified. Assuming these verifications are handled by trusted names, they could help to convey to users that the disclosures aren’t lies. One early criticism of Apple’s privacy labels was that many were providing inaccurate information — and were getting away with it, too.

Google says the new features will not roll out until Q2 2022, but it wanted to announce now in order to give developers plenty of time to prepare.

Image Credits: Google

There is, of course, a lot of irony to be found in an app privacy announcement from Google.

The company was one of the longest holdouts on issuing privacy labels for its own iOS apps, as it scrambled to review (and re-review, we understand) the labels’ content and disclosures. After initially claiming its labels would roll out “soon,” many of Google’s top apps then entered a lengthy period where they received no updates at all, as they were no longer compliant with App Store policies.

It took Google months after the deadline had passed to provide labels for its top apps. And when it did, it was mocked by critics — like privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo — for how much data apps like Chrome and the Google app collect.

Google’s plan to add a safety section of its own to Google Play gives it a chance to shift the narrative a bit.

It’s not a privacy push, necessarily. They’re not even called privacy labels! Instead, the changes seem designed to allow app developers to better explain if you can trust their app with your data, rather than setting the expectation that the app should not be collecting data in the first place.

How well this will resonate with consumers remains to be seen. Apple has made a solid case that it’s a company that compares about user privacy, and is adding features that put users in control of their data. It’s a hard argument to fight back against — especially in an era that’s seen too many data breaches to count, careless handling of private data by tech giants, widespread government spying, and a creepy adtech industry that grew to feel entitled to user data collection without disclosure.

Google says when the changes roll out, non-compliant apps will be required to fix their violations or become subject to policy enforcement. It hasn’t yet detailed how that process will be handled, or whether it will pause app updates for apps in violation.

The company noted its own apps would be required to share this same information and a privacy policy, too.

Source: Tech Crunch

The number of SPACs in the deep tech sector was skyrocketing, but a combination of increased SEC scrutiny and market forces over the past few weeks has slowed the pace of new SPAC transactions. The correction is an inevitable step on the path to mainstreaming SPACs as an alternative to IPOs, but it won’t cause them to go away. Instead, blank-check vehicles will evolve and will occupy a small and specialized — but important — part of the startup financing landscape.

The tsunami of SPAC financings sparked commentary from all corners of the capital markets community, from equity analysts and securities lawyers to VCs and fund managers — and even central bankers. That’s understandable, as more than $60 billion of SPAC deals have been announced since the beginning of 2020, plus $55 billion in PIPE capital, according to investment bank PJT Partners.

The views debated by finance experts often relate to the reasonableness of SPAC pricing and transaction structures, the alignment of incentives for stakeholders, and post-merger financial and stock price performance. But I’m not going to add another voice to the debate on the risk-reward calculus.

As the co-founder of a quantum computing software startup who worked in financial markets for two decades, I’d like to offer my perspective on two issues that I think my peers care more about: Can SPACs still solve the funding problem for capital-intensive, deep tech startups? And will they become a permanent financing option?

Keeping the lights on at deep tech startups

I believe that SPAC financings can solve a major problem for all capital-intensive technology startups: the need for faster — and potentially cheaper — access to large amounts of capital to fund product development over multiple years.

SPACs have created a limitless well of capital that deep tech startups are diving into. That’s because they are proving to be more attractive than other sources of financing, such as taking investment from later-stage VC funds or growth equity funds with finite fund sizes and specific investment themes.

The supply of growth capital from these vehicles has been astounding. In 2020, SPACs alone raised more than $83 billion via 248 IPOs, which is equal to a third of the total $300 billion raised by the entire global VC community. If the present rate of financings had continued, the annual amount of SPAC financings would have been on par with the total R&D expenditure of the U.S. government —  roughly $130 billion to $150 billion.

This new supply of capital can let startups keep the lights on, helping them address a practical need while they develop products that may take a decade to field. Before SPACs, any startup that wanted to remain independent had to lurch from one round of VC financing to the next. That, as well as the intense IPO process, is a major time sink for management teams and distracts them from focusing on product development.

Source: Tech Crunch

GM might be best known for the millions of Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC-branded vehicles it designs, produces, finances and sells each year. But it also has a burgeoning incubator, where a team of 600 employees are working to develop 20 new businesses with a total addressable market of about $1.3 trillion.

A few of the first startup fruits have already come to bear, including OnStar Guardian, OnStar Insurance, GM Defense and most recently, BrightDrop — the commercial electric vehicle delivery business that launched in January. Pam Fletcher, a veteran at GM and vice president of the company’s Global Innovation team, is at the center of this effort and helped shepherd BrightDrop from idea to startup graduate. And she’s not done.

An engineer by training, Fletcher has been given a lofty directive to turn high-potential innovative ideas into scalable business ventures that drive growth and transform the GM business model beyond traditional automotive. She’s coming to TC Sessions: Mobility 2021, a virtual event scheduled for June 9, to talk about their strategy and what’s coming next.

Fletcher’s experience is broad and global. She has held a variety of leadership positions, guiding the development of GM’s electric vehicle and self-driving portfolio and technologies. Prior to joining the innovation incubator, she was vice president of global electric vehicles at GM. The teams she directed were responsible for the development of two generations of the plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt and the all-electric Chevrolet Bolt EV. Her team also led the development of Super Cruise, the automaker’s hands-free highway driver assist system as well as three generations of Cruise AVs.

She also serves as a corporate director of Coherent Inc., a NASDAQ-listed company based in Silicon Valley, and is also a board member of GM Defense LLC. Fletcher was named to Motor Trend’s 2018 and 2019 Power List of auto industry leaders and was one of Fast Company’s “Most Creative People” of 2017. She serves on the board of advisers for the College of Engineering at the University of North Carolina Charlotte.

Fletcher is just one of many of the best and brightest minds in transportation who will be joining us on our virtual stage in June. Among the growing list of speakers is TechCrunch Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, Joby Aviation founder and CEO JoeBen Bevirt, investor and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, whose special purpose acquisition company just merged with Joby, investors Clara Brenner of Urban Innovation Fund, Quin Garcia of Autotech Ventures and Rachel Holt of Construct Capital, Starship Technologies co-founder and CEO/CTO Ahti Heinla, Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson, community organizer, transportation consultant and lawyer Tamika L. Butler, Remix co-founder and CEO Tiffany Chu and Revel co-founder and CEO Frank Reig.

Stay tuned for more announcements in the weeks leading up to the event. Early Bird sales end this Thursday, May 6. Be sure to book your tickets ASAP and save $100.

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Source: Tech Crunch