As humans get used to working at a distance from each other, a startup in Massachusetts is providing sensors that bring industrial robots in close —  centimeters away, in fact. The same technology may support future social distancing efforts on commutes, in a pilot application to allow more subway trains to run on a single track.

Humatics, an MIT spinout backed by Lockheed Martin and Airbus, makes sensors that enable fast-moving and powerful robots to work alongside humans without accidents. If daily work and personal travel to work ever go back to normal, the company believes the same precision can improve aging and crowded infrastructure, enabling trains and buses to run closer together, even as we all may have to get used to working further apart.

This is the emerging field of microlocation robotics — devices and software that help people and machines navigate collaboratively. Humatics has been testing its technology with New York’s MTA since 2018, and today is tracking five miles of a New York subway, showing the transportation authority where six of its trains are, down to the centimeter.

Image Credits: Humatics (opens in a new window)

UWB sensors for microlocation

Humatics’ technology in the MTA pilot uses ultrawide band (UWB) radio frequencies, which are less failure-prone than Wi-Fi, GPS and cameras.

“A good example of a harsh environment is a subway tunnel,” said David Mindell, co-founder of Humatics and professor of engineering and aerospace at MIT. “They are full of dust, the temperatures can range from subzero to 100 degrees, and there is the risk of animals or people tampering with devices. Working inside these tunnels is difficult and potentially dangerous for crews, also.”

Humatics has sold more than 10,000 UWB radio beacons, the base unit for their real-time tracking system, to manufacturers of sensor systems, the company says. They pinpoint the location of hundreds of RFID tags at a range of 500 meters, using multiple tags on an object to measure orientation.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Robotics startup lets machines get closer as humans keep their distance

As a tumultuous week of protests draws broad attention to America’s open wounds of racist police violence, a coalition of Black founders, advocates, investors and other leaders are issuing a call to action for those in the tech industry to stand against the systemic forces that continue to claim Black lives.

The effort, called “Black Tech for Black Lives,” pulls together a set of specific, actionable commitments intended to “support frontline leaders working to create a more just world.” The pledge is designed to elevate Bay Area community leaders working in tech’s epicenter on specific policy goals regarding issues like policing reform, local elections and by hiring and supporting more Black talent in tech.

The pledge also calls for justice for George Floyd, an unarmed Black man pinned on the neck by a police officer for more than eight minutes in a brutal act of disproportionate police violence that killed him. The event set off a nationwide movement that’s resulted in historic demonstrations against police brutality in all 50 states.

The pledge’s core group of signers are ReadySet CEO Y-Vonne Hutchinson, Aniyia Williams of Black and Brown Founders and Zebras Unite, Fastly’s Maurice Wilkins and Darrell Jones III of Just Cities and the TechEquity Collaborative. In its announcement, the collective shared its unique perspective on the industry during this deeply painful moment — and on bearing the burden of the long tradition of racist violence that led up to it:

“Tech is complicit. We as Black people in tech have a unique position and opportunity to respond to violence against Black people’s bodies. While we’re proximate to the pain, we largely avoid its most brutal physical outcomes. But we, too, feel the blows. We carry the scars on our psyches and hearts as our voices go largely unheard in the workplace and beyond.”

The group asks for anyone joining its effort to commit to one or more of its five goals:

• 1. Working toward swift prosecution for the individuals who killed George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade by supporting groups like the Center for Policing Equity and Color of Change.
• 2. Supporting police reform and accountability through signal boosting, volunteering and donating to organizations like the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Oakland’s Coalition for Police Accountability and SF Interrupting Racial Profiling.
• 3. Applying pressure to Bay Area police chiefs and police union leaders.
• 4. Pledging to hire and fund Black employees and founders, and also making real commitments to promote, mentor, sponsor them and support their success.
• 5. Helping elect local leaders with a proven record advocating for racial and social justice by supporting races for key positions like mayorships, city council seats and district attorneys.

The full call to action, with links to organizations to support, is available on the Black Tech for Black Lives page.

The pledge has been signed by a growing list of more than 150 names, including Y Combinator’s Michael Seibel, Backstage Capital’s Arlan Hamilton, Erica Joy, Bärí A. Williams, Former Obama Foundation CTO Leslie Miley, Kapor Capital Partner Ulili Onovakpuri, Kaya Thomas of We Read Too, Wayne Sutton, PitchBlack founder Stephen Green, The Human Utility founder Tiffani Ashley Bell, TechEquity Collaborative Co-Founder Catherine Bracy and TechCrunch’s own Megan Rose Dickey.

“Recent events make it clear that we can’t go back to the way things were,” the collective writes. “Let’s unite to make sure that Black lives and Black futures both matter.”

The effort also calls on white allies to join the call to action, encouraging them to move away from more passive notions of allyship toward becoming “accomplices” — a framing in activism that evokes an active approach in working toward equity and justice, even if that means transgressing rules or laws in standing against systemic anti-Blackness.

In a conversation with TechCrunch, Jones shared some context for the pledge — and reason to believe that the present wave of protests against police injustice and systemic anti-Blackness, even more so than in past national movements, could drive a nation in pain toward lasting change.

“The material conditions of Black America today are undeniably more desperate than the material conditions of Black America during Ferguson, and that is largely due to the coronavirus at the moment,” Jones told TechCrunch.

“When we look at levels of unemployment … when we look at the disproportionate health effects that COVID is having on communities and we look at the levels of business loss and I bet even if we look at the level the distribution of businesses that receive funding from PPP or anything like that, odds are that we’re still disproportionately disadvantaged in all of those categories.”

Jones believes that like conversations around universal basic income — suddenly thrust into mainstream discourse as the pandemic ravages financial stability for millions of Americans — the coronavirus crisis is also accelerating the dialogue around systemic discrimination as it plays out in devastating health outcomes for Black Americans.

As those conversations move forward, Jones says that a “vacuum of reasonable, rational and compassionate leadership” in the federal government is driving more attention toward local change — where the real change happens.

“There will be this rush to the national conversation and to fill that vacuum of leadership nationally, but folks can see — or at least I hope they might see — that the biggest lever they have for change on these issues is right where they live, right here,” Jones said.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Black tech leaders issue call to action to fight racial injustice in the Bay Area

While many areas of the economy are set to reopen in the coming weeks — if they’re not already — most startups never actually closed. Tucked away in houses and apartments across the country, founders have been not only focused on running their businesses, but also on securing capital to boost growth once the economy has normalized.

For the most part, the fundraising marketplace has remained open (for a deep dive into VC behavior over the last two months go here). But the last two weeks could be establishing a new normal for fundraising this year that should make founders optimistic. Even though most VCs aren’t taking in-person meetings, and there are still a lot of questions about what our economy will look like in the coming months, VCs are more active this month than they were in May of both 2019 and 2018.

We’re using the 2020 DocSend Startup Index to track three major metrics to show us real-time trends in the fundraising marketplace. Using aggregate and anonymous data pulled from thousands of pitch deck interactions across the DocSend platform, we’re able to track the supply and demand in the marketplace, as well as the quality of pitch deck interactions.

VC interest is at a two-year high

We’re tracking pitch deck interactions across our platform on a weekly basis to compare how VCs are operating today against a backdrop of the last two years. One of the main metrics we look at is pitch deck demand, as measured by the average number of pitch deck interactions for each founder happening on our platform right now.

While VC interest took a dive in March (more on that here), the last two weeks have shown unseasonably high interest. Typically, May signals the beginning of the summer slowdown, which bottoms out around August. However, in the last two weeks, we’ve seen VC interest on average 21% higher than in the previous two years.

While VC interest is high, it’s possible we’re just seeing a displacement of the typical demand we see in the spring, and that the summer dip is still coming. However, the other metrics we’re tracking lead us to believe that we’re going to sustain this growth for at least the rest of May and potentially well into June.

Image Credits: DocSend

Founder supply is keeping up with VC demand

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | The fundraising marketplace has stabilized. Or has it?

For many startups looking to secure funds, the fundraising marketplace has been a bit of a roller coaster. While there are signs that should make founders feel very optimistic (more on that here), it’s important to know how we got to this point.

We’ve used data from the 2020 DocSend Startup Index to track three major metrics to show us real-time trends in the fundraising marketplace. Using aggregate and anonymous data pulled from thousands of pitch deck interactions across the DocSend platform, we’re able to track the supply and demand in the marketplace, as well as the quality of pitch deck interactions.

The main two metrics we’ll be looking at are Pitch Deck Interest and Founder Links Created. Pitch Deck Interest is measured by the average number of pitch deck interactions for each founder happening on our platform per week, and is a great proxy for demand. Founder Links Created is how many unique links a founder is creating to their deck each week; because each person you send a document to in DocSend gets a unique link, we can use this as a proxy for demand by looking at how many investors a founder is sending their deck to.

When looking at what’s happened so far this year, we can potentially see where the marketplace is headed.

January and February were off to a roaring start

We all know 2018 was a great year for startup fundraising. And that can be seen in how many pitch decks were being consumed per founder across our platform. In fact, Q1 of 2018 posted nine of the highest weekly totals in all of 2018 and 2019. Investors’ demand was high and there was a lot of capital to deploy. But while 2020 didn’t come out of the gate as strong, demand started gaining momentum by February. In fact, the week of February 10th actually surpassed the demand in the same week of 2018 and was a whopping 19% ahead of 2019.

But the fundraising market isn’t a one-way street, there needs to be a steady supply of pitch decks being sent by founders to meet investor demand. During Q1 of 2018, founders were conservative in sending out their pitch decks (it might not be a coincidence that this is when we started to see a lot of “mega rounds,” as there was far less supply than there was demand). However, founders started courting far more investors in 2019, generating more interest and competition for their companies. We saw a huge jump in links created in the first two months of 2020 and it peaked at a 41% increase year-over-year during the week of January 27. According to the data, 2020 was on pace to match the fundraising activity of 2018.

When things ground to a halt

While it’s clear the trend was moving toward another blockbuster year for fundraising, we’ll never know what was going to happen. We saw the first drop in investor interest in the week of February 24th, just as people were becoming more aware of the very real threat of COVID-19. In fact, founder activity actually started to decline the week of February 17th. While the first two weeks of March saw the beginnings of the market shift (the first two weeks of March dropped nearly 12% as compared to the first two weeks of February), the week of March 16th is when we saw the major drop.

The week of March 16th saw pitch deck interest down more than 20% and links created down more than 21% from their 2020 height in February. This is also the week many places adopted shelter-in-place or other social-distancing orders. It was also when the economic impact began to affect many companies, with VCs spending more time with their portfolio companies as the COVID-19 crisis intensified. In fact, the top four worst days of 2020 for Pitch Deck Interest (other than in the first week of January) were: March 19th, 6th, 12th and 20th.

What April can tell us about finding a new normal

After the initial decline in March, founders and VCs both bounced back fairly quickly. In fact, the next week VC interest increased 10% while the number of Founder Links Created increased by 12%. However, for the following few weeks the number of links created by founders either stayed flat or dropped. But that isn’t the case for VCs. Demand for pitch decks rose steadily all the way through the week of April 20th, which was 25% up year-over-year. In fact, seven of the top 10 best days for Pitch Deck Interest in 2020 were in the month of April.

There could be many reasons founders aren’t sending their decks out with the fervor they were in January and February. Many are adjusting their business models and plans to account for the new environment, some are concerned they may be asked to change their valuation or ask and still others are working with their current investors rather than seeking more outside capital.

What we do know is that investor interest was on par earlier this year to outpace 2018, and investors only took a brief pause to adjust in March when the pandemic hit. That means there is just as much capital ready to deploy, and just as much investor interest as there was earlier this year. However, founders are still adjusting to the new market conditions. This means the fundraising marketplace is starting to look very much like it did in early 2018, with investor interest high, but founders supply not quite meeting the demand. This is good news for founders, as some of their fears of less favorable terms may not actually be a reality.

The next phase for founders

There are many reasons to be optimistic about what the next few months will bring for founders (more on that here). We update our Pitch Deck Interest metrics every week on Mondays, so you can get a real-time view of what’s happening in the fundraising marketplace. And while investor interest can seem theoretical, we’ve put together an Active VC List to show which investors are taking meetings and writing term sheets. While the companies receiving funding now might be different than they were just a few months ago, it still looks like a blockbuster year in terms of investors looking to make deals.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | What the last 2 months of fundraising tells us about the future

Orbital spacecraft sustainability startup Astroscale has acquired the IP, most assets and staff of an Israeli company called Effective Space Solutions in order to broaden its service offering to include servicing geostationary (GEO) satellites, as well as low Earth orbit (LEO) debris removal. Astroscale, founded in Japan in 2013 with a mission of addressing the growing problem of orbital debris and sustainable space operations, is also setting up an office in Israel as part of this deal.

Already, Astroscale has offices in the U.K., the U.S. and Singapore, and this new arrangement will make it even more of a global company. The operation in Israel will focus on the GEO satellite life extension aspect of the business, which is what ESS was working on previously. Satellite life extension is actually something that a number of companies are looking to develop and bring to market, including orbital “gas station” company Orbit Fab, as well as larger legacy industry companies like Maxar.

Extending the life of GEO satellites with on-orbit servicing is potentially a very lucrative industry, as it would mean that companies can get a lot more usable life, and revenue, out of their considerable investments in building the expensive, large and pricey to launch spacecraft to begin with.

GEO satellites provide crucial communications and navigation infrastructure, including via GPS, as well as satellite internet networks and long-distance Earth imaging and observation capabilities. On-orbit satellite servicing could mean that these investments, which can range into the billions, can operate long beyond their intended lifespan, and could even eventually be updated with new hardware, sensors or other capabilities as more modern equipment than they launched with becomes available.

Launch costs are often the most expensive part of deploying any orbital spacecraft, so the potential of repurposing existing on orbit assets through life extension efforts could change the fundamental economics of doing business in space.

Astroscale will be taking on and continuing to develop ESS’ Space Drone program, which is not yet at the point where it’s actually launching orbital space servicing missions, but the work of the Israeli company will definitely give Astrocale a leg-up in terms of building out its own orbital servicing ambitions.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Astroscale expands into geostationary satellite life extension with new acquisition

In entrepreneurship, timing is everything. Launch too early and the market or underlying tech may not be ready to support your idea. Launch too late and the opportunity may have already been conceded to competitors. For Endlesss, the music-making app from Tim Exile, the timing feels just right.

Launched on March 31st, just as the U.K. and many other countries around the world entered lockdown, the iOS app’s collaborative approach to music making proved to be an overnight hit. It seems that many people not only had time to fill, but craved the kinds of social and creative interactions that Endlesss was conceived to facilitate.

More broadly, Exile tells me the app and cloud-service is based on the premise that music has always been about performance and social interactions. However, as the recording industry developed, the tools for making music developed with it. This saw the onus put squarely on producing a final product — music-making as a means to an end rather than a means in itself — and along the way the spontaneity or “in the moment” element of music has been lost.

A vision years in the making (see this video interview with Exile conducted by TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher in 2016), the resulting Endlesss app combines software recreations of drum machines, samplers, synths and FX, with a “tap to loop” workflow that should be familiar to anyone who has used a looper pedal or loop-based sequencer. The app also accepts live audio for use with guitars, mics and other external instruments. However, the clever part is the way these loops or riffs can be shared or remixed by others participating in your jam — essentially sending musical messages back and forth as if it were a chatroom. Or at least that’s one analogy Exile is fond of using.

“Endlesss started life as an instrument I developed to allow me to take a spontaneous performative approach to improvising electronic music,” explains Exile in a Medium post. “I wanted to liberate myself from the perfectionism that I fell into in long solitary hours in my studio. The workflow evolved over a decade of regular touring at a time when process-based music was an arty experimental niche. At first I wanted to build a career for myself as an improvising musician but I soon realised there was much greater potential in what this workflow could do for others.”

Now, via a Kickstarter campaign launching today, the Endlesss team is aiming to bring an even more ambitious version to desktop Macs and Windows machines, including VST/AU compatibility for integration with your favourite DAW. Dubbed Endlesss Studio, the idea is to retain the accessibility and sense of play that the iOS app delivers, but couple it with a more involved studio setup so the music-making possibilities really are endless.

With that said, a few Kickstarter caveats. Endlesss Studio isn’t planned to ship fully until next year, with backers given access to an alpha version in December 2020 at the earliest and a beta release scheduled for February 2021. However, the team already has a track record shipping software, including the iOS app and accompanying cloud-based back end, so hopefully the release dates won’t slip too much, if at all.

Exile has also thought long and hard about how to create a sustainable business model that will support an even more ambitious roadmap into the future. Early Kickstarter backers can grab lifetime access to Endlesss Studio for a one-off fee, but the longer-term model is a monthly subscription of $12 per month — jamming as a service, if you will. This includes HD audio-quality jams and archives, an option that should prove popular for users who want to use Endlesss as a jumping off place for more polished tracks. In fact, Exile has already launched a record label dedicated to Endlesss-enabled releases.

Meanwhile, Endlesss isn’t entirely self-funded. The startup disclosed its first funding round in July last year. Backers include Tim Clark (co-founder, IE:Music), Mathew Daniel (VP International, NetEase Cloud Music), Dhiraj Mukherjee (co-founder, Shazam), Richard Jones (manager, Pixies) and Paul Kempe (Tileyard), along with a number of unnamed but “well-known” artists. In addition to equity funding, Endlesss has also received a grant from Innovate UK.

The company’s advisory board includes Stephen O’Reilly (IE:Music, Topspin), Cliff Fluet (Eleven Advisory) and Will Mills (Shazam, LyricFind).

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Endlesss, the iOS music-making app from Tim Exile, takes to Kickstarter for desktop version

As we continue to see protests across the U.S. (and elsewhere) sparked by the killing of George Floyd by police in Minnesota, SoftBank is announcing a new investment vehicle to back entrepreneurs of color, part of its contribution to trying to redress the imbalance of power as it has played out in the tech world.

Today it launched the Opportunity Growth Fund, which “will only invest in companies led by founders and entrepreneurs of color,” according to an internal memo from SoftBank’s COO Marcelo Claure on the new fund.

Claure said the fund will initially start with $100 million, meaning that there is scope for SoftBank (the primary limited partner) or other limited partners to add more over time.

This latest fund is timely given events of the last week and how they have highlighted what is arguably centuries of power imbalance — a significant point that shouldn’t be ignored. But it also comes at a time when SoftBank — one of the biggest names of VC in the world these days — has been hit very hard on its investment practices, with its own share of racial controversy within that.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the CEO and founder of one of its portfolio companies, Banjo, resigned after it was revealed that he once had ties to the KKK. Before that news hit, the big story was about SoftBank’s very large bets on companies like WeWork and Uber (and others) that have not paid off, leading to a number of problems at individual portfolio companies. And before that, there were questions over who invests in its funds, and what kind of wider message that sends over the company’s ethics.

Developments like these have left lingering question marks over SoftBank’s wider investment choices. All of these remain issues, even as it makes some important and symbolic strides to do the right thing.

The steps today are in the correct direction, it seems. Notably, SoftBank said that it will not take a traditional management fee for transactions out of the fund “but instead will seek to put as much capital as possible into the hands of founders and entrepreneurs of color.”

Claure will co-lead the fund alongside Shu Nyatta, with Paul Judge (the founder of TechSquare and chairman of Pindrop) and Stacy Brown-Philpot (of TaskRabbit and many other roles) the first to named to the investment committee.

The Opportunity Fund is the third investment vehicle announced by SoftBank in the last several years. The biggest of them all is the $100 billion Vision Fund; then last year it announced the $2 billion Innovation Fund focused on Latin America.

SoftBank has also been building other efforts to foster more diverse and inclusive investment activity. Its Emerge accelerator for underrepresented founders, created in partnership with WeWork Labs, unveiled its first cohort of companies last month.

Compared to the outsized nature of the Vision Fund, or even the more diminutive but still multi-billion-dollar size of the Innovation Fund, the Opportunity Growth Fund’s $100 million size seems relatively modest for now, and it begs some questions over how SoftBank more generally plans to direct its bigger coffers when it comes to investing in a deeper and more meaningful and inclusive way.

It’s a large issue. As SoftBank itself points out, currently just 1% of VC-backed founders are black, with the vast majority of investment going into startups founded by while males.

There are signs that this is part of a bigger strategic effort. SoftBank’s Claure noted in his memo that the plan will be to reinvest 50% of the gains from the first Opportunity Fund into subsequent Growth Opportunity Funds, with a portion of the gains it makes outside of that donated to organizations that support opportunities for people of color.

Additionally, Claure said that it’s trying to do more than just invest: it’s reassessing how it handles hiring both for portfolio companies and for SoftBank itself, and establishing a diversity program to improve that, with a focus on leadership and board seats.

“I promise to do what I can to be an effective ally to Black Americans who have been fighting this injustice for centuries. Only by acknowledging and acting on racism – even the most subtle forms of it – can we hope to eradicate it. Otherwise, it thrives in silence,” Claure writes. He also encourages staff to donate to organizations that are working on initiatives to eradicate racism and discrimination, and says that SoftBank will be matching donations of up to $1,000. “The only wrong plan is to plan to do nothing.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | SoftBank launches 0M+ Opportunity Growth Fund to invest in founders of color