Light’s push into smartphones was an inevitability. Sure, the startup turned heads with its pricey L16 camera, but these days mobile photography is almost exclusively the domain of the handset. Early last year, the answer arrived in the form of the trypophobia-inducing Nokia 9 PureView.

In a category where manufacturers raced to add more cameras, the PureView had the most, with a five-hexagonal array. It was new, innovative and for most, it was overkill. At the very least, however, it gave Nokia/HMD some bragging rights and managed to set the handset apart in one of the most hotly contested corners of the smartphone hardware race.

But Light is getting out of the smartphone game. Ultimately, the competition may have just been too stiff for a small startup, especially with many manufacturers working on their own native hardware and software solutions.

Light confirmed the move this week in an email to Android Authority, writing simply that it was “no longer operating in the smartphone industry.” It’s a surprising bit of news, given that mobile partnerships seemed like the most logical way forward for the company, which drummed up a $121 million in a SoftBank-led round back in 2018. That Series D brought the Palo Alto-based company’s total funding up to more than $181 million.

More recently, it also signed deals with Sony and Xiaomi. No word on what such a move means for those partnerships going forward. Nor is it clear what life after smartphones looks like for Light. We’ve reached out to the company for more insight into its plans.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Imaging startup Light is exiting the smartphone business

It has been an incredibly tough period for everyone the past few months as the global COVID-19 pandemic has wiped out whole industries from the economic map.

While tech has been among the most resilient industries in the face of this cataclysm, the extreme mobility of the industry’s workforce begs large questions about what the future of startups and work will look like moving forward.

We’ve debated what COVID-19 will do to the rise of the college town as startup hubs and how the pandemic will change the way we work in coffee shops and neighborhoods. Now, we want to address one of the larger questions that has been bugging us: Will tech continue to centralize in hubs like San Francisco and New York City, or will remote work and all the other second-order effects lead to a more decentralized startup ecosystem?

We have three perspectives from our writers, with wildly different predictions about what the future has in store.

First, we have Danny Crichton, who believes that tech, and particularly the VC industry, will remain as concentrated as ever, although where it is concentrated will perhaps shift a bit. Meanwhile, Alex Wilhelm asserts that startup growth outside major hubs will actually accelerate, spreading tech wealth even farther outside the metropolises. Finally, Natasha Mascarenhas argues that the combination of the economic dislocation of COVID-19 and the increasing attention to equity in tech will lead to more intense investment outside core startup hubs.

Danny Crichton: A new Napa Valley café shows why in-person networks matter

First there was Sand Hill Road. Then there was South Park. And now there’s Solbar at Solage in Calistoga.

Despite the wide availability of remote work tools over the past two decades, VCs have always miraculously congregated in extraordinarily tight quarters. VCs weren’t attracted to Sand Hill’s low-slung office buildings for the architecture, which were and are a terror to eyes with a taste for anything more sophisticated than “here be four walls and a roof.” VCs didn’t head to South Park to enjoy what Google Maps calls a “tree-lined oval garden” nestled between light industrial buildings. And they aren’t heading to Solbar in Napa Valley for Californian cuisine and a dining room conveniently closed on Partner Mondays.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | 3 perspectives on the future of SF and NYC as startup hubs

APX is an early-stage accelerator in Berlin, but it’s not quite your average accelerator — it’s essentially a joint venture between giant European publishing house Axel Springer and Porsche, the German automaker. Earlier this month, we sat down with APX managing director Jörg Rheinboldt to discuss what makes APX different and how it’s weathering the coronavirus pandemic.

Rheinboldt has quite a bit of experience as both an entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded Alando.de, which was acquired by eBay in 1999 and donation platform betterplace.org in 2007. In 2013, he became CEO of Axel Springer Plug and Play and during his time as an investor, he put money into companies like N26, Zizoo, Blogfoster and Careship.

“We started APX because Plug and Play wanted to become more of a platform for matchmaking between startups and corporates,” Rheinboldt said when I asked him about the project’s origin. “We, the team, enjoyed investing in early-stage companies a lot and Axel Springer also enjoyed investing in early-stage startups a lot. So we decided to stop investing in new companies Axel Springer Plug and Play. We had invested in 102 companies — and focus[ed] on finding interesting teams to invest in with a new company that we needed to found.”

Image Credits: Dominik Tryba

Rheinboldt took this discussion to his boss, Mathias Döpfner, the current CEO of Axel Springer, who encouraged him to find another shareholder. “If it’s only us, you might have to do what we want — and maybe you don’t want that,” he said Döpfner told him. In looking for a partner, Rheinboldt approached the Porsche family, which he had met at some of his previous investor events. The family was looking to diversify its portfolio, so after a few more meetings, including a presentation at Porsche’s leadership summit, the two companies decided to get into this business together.

One interesting thing Rheinboldt noted — and this isn’t so much about the Porsche family as a general observation — is that family offices are often resistant to getting into venture capital, at least in Germany.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | ‘The money is still there,’ says APX managing director Jörg Rheinboldt