Month: September 2021

Beleaguered electric truck developer Nikola Corp. has inked a new agreement with Bosch for its hydrogen fuel cell modules. The modules will be used to power two of Nikola’s hydrogen-fueled semi-trucks, the short-haul Nikola Tre and Nikola Two sleeper.

“This announcement is the result of a multi-year working relationship with Bosch,” Nikola CEO Mark Russell said in a statement. “After extensive analysis of the best options out there, we are proud to enter into this strategic relationship with Bosch.”

The news is a positive sign for the relationship between the two companies, which has not always been smooth. Bosch invested at least $100 million in the hydrogen truck startup in 2019 but reduced its shares in the company the following year. Bosch also said last year it would supply fuel cells for Nikola’s European operations.

Nikola declined to share the financial terms of the deal or details regarding fuel cell system volume. Nikola will assemble the hydrogen fuel cell power modules at its facility in Coolidge, Arizona. Bosch will also supply fully assembled power modules, the company said in a statement Thursday. To support power module assembly, Nikola said it will expand the Arizona facility by 50,000 square feet and up to 50 new employees by 2023. The truck maker is also planning to expand its engineering and testing facilities at its headquarters in nearby Phoenix.

A Nikola spokesperson said the new agreement does not affect the company’s relationships with other companies for fuel cell systems and components, including a non-binding MOU with General Motors for the automaker’s Hydrotec fuel cell system that was announced in November last year.

Nikola went public via a merger with blank-check firm VectoIQ Acquisition Corp. At the beginning of this month, the company told investors that it was cutting its delivery outlook for electric semis from 50 to 100 units to just 25 to 50. However, company executives did say that it had built 14 pre-production vehicles, including five alpha and nine beta prototypes.

Meanwhile, Nikola’s former CEO and founder, Trevor Milton, promised a criminal court that he would reside at his Utah ranch until he can be tried for securities fraud and misleading investors.

Source: Tech Crunch

Few people thought of virtual events before the pandemic struck, but this format has fulfilled a unique and important need for companies and organizations large and small during the pandemic. But what will virtual events’ value be as more of the world attempts to return to life before COVID-19?

To find out, we caught up with top executives and investors in the sector to learn about the big trends they’re seeing — as the sequel to this survey we did in March 2020.

Certain use cases have been proven, they say. Today, you can find numerous small niche events available year-round that might have been buried in the back of a larger in-person conference before 2020. For organizations, internal virtual events can also be instrumental in helping connect and promote engagement for remote-first teams.

However, some respondents acknowledged that low-quality virtual events are growing ever more common, and everyone agreed that there is much more work to be done.

We surveyed:

• Xiaoyin Qu, founder and CEO, Run The World
  
• Rosie Roca, chief customer officer, Hopin
  
• Hemant Mohapatra, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners India
• Paul Murphy, former investor in Hopin with Northzone (currently co-founder of Katch)

Xiaoyin Qu, founder and CEO, Run The World

With the pandemic hopefully becoming more manageable soon, do you feel a return to in-person events is inevitable?

Certain types of events will go back to in person. Obviously, something to do with a President’s Club — the company rewards you with a party in Hawaii — that kind of thing will not go virtual. I think events more focused on increasing reach will continue to trend toward virtual.

We’re also seeing that many events are getting smaller, more niche. Before the pandemic, if we look at a general pediatric conference, for example, an attendee may only be interested in two topics out of the 200 offered. But now we’ve seen that there’s a rise in many niche events that focus on very specific topics, which helps streamline these events for attendees.

I think such events are still going to happen virtually just because they’re easier to organize and people can have more in-depth conversations. Internal virtual events for employees is another category that is getting more traction, because companies have been going remote. So many the internal events like the company happy hour — events that help employees engage better — we think that’s still going to happen virtually. So there are a number of use cases we think will continue to be virtual and are probably better virtual.

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What sort of trends do you think will emerge once in-person events are possible again?

Another important trend we’re seeing is that a lot of organizers have begun hosting events more frequently. They were doing large conferences in the past, but now they’re pivoting or they’re rethinking their strategy. They realize that hosting maybe 10 events a year is better than hosting one big event every year. A traditional conference is usually multiday, with maybe 200 different topics and 100 different speakers. Now a lot of people are thinking about spreading it out throughout the year.

Source: Tech Crunch

After opening applications in June, Twitter is rolling out Super Follows, its premium subscription option, starting today.

The feature, first revealed in February, will allow users to subscribe to accounts they like for a monthly subscription fee in exchange for exclusive content. For creators, Super Follows are another useful tool in the emerging patchwork of monetization options across social platforms.

Eligible accounts can set the price for Super Follow subscriptions, with the option of charging $2.99, $4.99 or $9.99 per month, prices fairly comparable to a paid newsletter. They can then choose to mark some tweets for subscribers only, while continuing to reach their unpaid follower base in regular tweets.

Paid subscribers will be marked with a special Super Follower badge, differentiating them from unpaid followers in the sea of tweets. The badge shows up in replies, elevating a follower’s ability to interact directly with accounts they opt to support. For accounts that have Super Follows turned on, the option will show up with a distinct button on the profile page.

Super Follows aren’t turned on for everyone. For now, the process remains application only, with a waitlist. The option lives in the Monetization options in the app’s sidebar, though users will need to be U.S.-based with 10K followers and at least 25 tweets within the last month to be eligible.

U.S. and Canada-based iOS Twitter users will be able to Super Follow some accounts starting today, with more users globally seeing the rollout in the coming weeks. On the creator side, Super Follows are only enabled in iOS for now, though support for Android and desktop are “coming soon.”

Twitter says that Super Follow income will be subject to the standard, though controversial, 30 percent in-app purchase fees collected by Apple or Google. Twitter will only take a 3 percent cut of earnings for up to the first $50,000 generated through Super Follows — a boon for smaller accounts getting off the ground or anyone who uses the paid Twitter feature as a way to supplement other creator income elsewhere. After an account hits the $50,000 earnings mark, Twitter will begin taking a 20 percent cut.

Super Follows aren’t Twitter’s first monetization experiment to make it out in the wild. In May, Twitter introduced Tip Jar, a way for accounts to receive one-time payments through integration with the Cash App and other payment platforms. The test is limited to a subset of eligible accounts including “creators, journalists, experts, and nonprofits” for the time being.

Last week Twitter rolled out Ticketed Spaces for users who applied for the paid audio room feature back in June. Twitter’s cut from Ticketed Spaces mirrors the same fee structure it uses for Super Follows and users will be able to charge anywhere from one dollar to $999 for advanced ticketing.

The product is the latest in a flurry of activity from the social platform after a lengthy period of product stagnation. But Twitter has been busy in the last twelve months, from releasing and killing its ill-fated Fleets to finally showing signs of life on the kind of anti-abuse features many people have been calling for for years.

Giving users the ability to charge for premium content is a pretty major departure for Twitter, which mostly stayed the course until activist shareholders threatened to oust CEO Jack Dorsey. It’s also a major move for the company into the white-hot creator space, as more platforms add tools to empower their users to make a living through content creation — ideally keeping them loyal and generating revenue in the process.

Source: Tech Crunch

Berlin Brands Group — one of the new wave of e-commerce startups hoping to build lucrative economies of scale around buying up smaller brands that sell on marketplaces like Amazon and using technology to run and scale them more efficiently — has picked up a big round of funding to fill out that mission. The startup has closed a round of $700 million, comprising both equity and debt, which it will use in part to continue building its fulfillment and logistics infrastructure, as well as its tech platform, and in part to buy more companies.

BBG confirmed that the investment — one of the biggest to date in the space — boosts its valuation to over $1 billion.

Bain Capital is leading the equity portion of this round. The deal will also see it buy out a previous investor, Ardian, for an undisclosed amount that is separate to the $700 million raise.

This funding round is the second announced by BBG this year. In January it announced it would be investing $302 million off its own balance sheet for M&A, and in April it announced a debt round of $240 million. This latest $700 million is different in that it includes the equity component alongside the equity.

BBG got its start initially developing its own products and selling them on Amazon and other marketplaces — founder and CEO CEO Peter Chaljawski was a DJ in a previous life and started with a focus on audio equipment he developed for himself.

Over time, it saw an opportunity to diversify that into a wider consolidation play, where BBG would also acquire and merge third party brands into its business, tapping into the opportunity to provide the owners of the third-party businesses an exit route and bring those smaller brands more scale, more marketing nous, and more tech to improve the efficiency of their operations.

Today the mix totals 3,700 products and 14 own brands, including Klarstein (kitchen appliances), auna (home electronics and music equipment), Capital Sports (home fitness) and blumfeldt (garden). BBG says it has access to some 1.5 billion e-commerce customers across various marketplaces where it sells goods in Europe, the UK, the U.S. and Asia. Notablym unlike many others in the same space as BBG, it is focused on more than Amazon, with some 100 channels in 28 countries.

That list of “many others in the same space” is a long one and seemingly growing by the day. Yesterday, two of them — Heroes and Olsam — respectively raised $200 million and $165 million. Others leveraging the opportunity of consolidating merchants that sell via Fulfillment by Amazon include  Suma Brands ($150 million); Elevate Brands ($250 million); Perch ($775 million); factory14 ($200 million); Thrasio (currently probably the biggest of them all in terms of reach and money raised and ambitions), Heyday, The Razor Group, Branded, SellerX, Berlin Brands Group (X2), Benitago, Latin America’s Valoreo and Rainforest and Una Brands out of Asia.

As more startups enter the fray, all battling to buy the best of the third-party brands will become more of a challenge, and so the backing of Bain should help BBG shore up against that competition.

“With Bain Capital’s commitment and the additional funding secured, we have set our next milestone on our path to building a global house of brands,” said Chaljawski in a statement. “This allows us to tackle strategic goals of acquiring and developing brands globally, as well as the operational and logistical expansion. Bain Capital’s experience working with founders worldwide will help us continue our evolution as a leading e-commerce company in scaling brands.”

“BBG is a disruptive leader in the rapidly changing consumer goods space. Their ability to develop and scale brands that meet current consumer trends through their highly efficient e-commerce platform gives the company tremendous growth potential in a fast-growing market,” added Miray Topay, MD at Bain Capital Private Equity. “We have partnered with many founder-led management teams and look forward to helping Peter and his team achieve their goal of becoming a global leader in consumer e-commerce”.

Source: Tech Crunch

In the United States, a 401(k) plan is an employer-sponsored defined-contribution pension account. However, with legacy institutional investing, most of these have at least some level of fossil fuel involvement and let’s face it, very few of us really know. Now a startup plans to change that.

California-based startup Sphere wants to get employees to ask their employers for investment options that are not invested in fossil fuels. To do that it’s offering financial products that make it easier – it says – for employers to offer fossil-free investment options in their 401(k) plans. This could be quite a big movement. Sphere says there are over $35 trillion in assets in retirement savings in the US as of Q1 2021.

It’s now raised a $2M funding round led by climatetech-focused VC Pale Blue Dot led the investment round. Also participating were climate-focused investors including Sundeep Ahuja of Climate Capital. Sphere is also a registered ‘Public Benefit Corporation’ allowing it to campaign in public about climate change.

Alex Wright-Gladstein, CEO and founder of Sphere said: “We are proud to be partnering with Pale Blue Dot on our mission to reverse climate change by making our money talk. Heidi, Hampus, and Joel have the experience and drive to help us make big changes on the short 7 year time scale that we have to limit warming to 1.5°C.” Wright-Gladstein has also teamed up with sustainable investing veteran Jason Britton of Reflection Asset Management and BITA custom indexes.

Wright-Gladstein said she learned the difficulty of offering fossil-free options in 401(k) plans when running her previous startup, Ayar Labs. She tried to offer a fossil-free option for employees, but found out it took would take three years to get a single fossil-free option in the plan.

Heidi Lindvall, General Partner at Pale Blue Dot said: “We are big believers in Sphere’s unique approach of raising awareness through a social movement while offering a range of low-cost products that address the structural issues in fossil-free 401(k) investing.”

Source: Tech Crunch