Browsing Tag: Startups

When siblings Labinot and Mimoza Bytyqi fled the war in Kosovo in 1999, arriving as refugees on the West Coast of the U.S., they would have had no idea they’d go on to launch a technology company together.

But as adults, the pair set up attacking the $6.7 billion telepresence and video communication category, which hasn’t evolved much since the older business systems from Cisco and Polycom . By integrating their Solaborate device with Smart TVs, the entrepreneurs have come up with a drastically cheaper device and platform.

Solaborate has now closed a $10 million Series A funding round from EPOS and Demant Group. EPOS is a newly established company under the healthcare tech company Demant Group in Denmark, which makes high-end audio solutions designed for enterprise and gaming. The funding will be used to accelerate the development of Solaborate’s new product line of all-in-one HELLO devices and its cloud communication platform.

After two successful Kickstarter campaigns, Solaborate will now work with EPOS to combine compute, microphones, speakers and Smart TVs with their technology to create products fully owned by and branded under EPOS. These will include Solaborate’s patented auto echo-cancellation delay.

Labinot Bytyqi, founder and CEO said: “We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right and that’s why we engineered HELLO devices with video and audio built-in hack-proof privacy controls and end-to-end encryption for everyone’s protection and peace of mind.”

A HELLO device require only two cables — HDMI and power — and then turns any TV into a voice-controlled open cross-platform communication and collaboration device supporting video conferencing platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts Meet, Zoom, Skype, Cisco WebEx, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, BlueJeans, Fuze, Unify and several more.

The partnership will focus on video collaboration to deliver integrated audio/video solutions to the platforms of EPOS’ current strategic partners, such as Microsoft.

They are pushing at an open door. The video conferencing market is predicted to grow from an estimated $1.8 billion to more than $2.8 billion by 2022, according to some studies.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Smart TV hub Solaborate secures M Series A and a go-to-market partnership

I visited Boston last week and met with a number of robotics researchers, startups and established companies — more on that later — in the lead up to TechCrunch’s fourth annual TC Sessions Robotics + AI in early March. A big part of prepping for that event and my recent trip involved surveying some of the biggest funding raises from the past year.

A quick survey of these trends finds most investments concentrated in a handful of key categories. From there, we can get a pretty clear view of what the robotics industry will look like in the coming years and the roles we can expect these machines to play in our daily lives.

The definition of robotics is, of course, broad and only getting broader, as these technologies grow and mature. It’s worth noting that for the sake of my own research, I’ve mostly excluded autonomous driving — one of the key targets of robotics investment. It is, perhaps, an arbitrary distinction that has more to do with the way we categorize technologies — placing them in automotive or mobility, as opposed to robotics.

Artificial intelligence startups, too, are included sparingly for similar reasons. With those caveats in mind, these verticals have been the key focuses of robotics investments: warehouse automation/fulfillment, construction, retail/food, agriculture and surgical/medical.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | What robotics’ biggest raises tell us about the industry’s future

There’s yet another new rocket launch startup throwing its hat in the ring — Astra, an Alameda-based company that’s actually been operating in stealth mode (though relatively openly, often referred to as “Stealth Space Company”) for the past three years developing and testing its launch vehicle. Astra revealed its business model and progress to date in a new feature article with Bloomberg Businessweek, detailing how it plans to use mass production to deliver rockets quickly and cheaply for small satellite orbital delivery. Astra revealed it has raised more than $100 million from investors, including Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Airbus Ventures, Canann Partners and Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff, to name a few, and it has big ambitions in terms of cost and capabilities.

Astra’s rockets are smaller than most existing launch vehicles in operation, designed to delivery up to 450 lbs of cargo to space, but with the specific mandate of doing so quickly and responsively. The company is a finalist (and the only remaining one) on Darpa’s Launch Challenge, the terms of which mandate that the winning company deploy two rockets from two different locations within a few weeks of each other. Astra is still in the running, while its erstwhile competitors have dropped out, with Virgin Orbit having voluntarily withdrawn and Vector Launch having gone out of business.

The Darpa challenge, which includes an award of $12 million for the winner, represents a growing trend in terms of defense customer needs: Fast turnaround and responsive operations for small satellite delivery. In an industry where the process of securing a launch service provider to actually flying a payload has typically taken at least six months in the best-case scenario, there’s a growing need for quicker timelines in the interest of building more redundancy and resilience into defense and reconnaissance space operations through use of networks of small satellites, versus single large geostationary satellites that are expensive to launch and more time-consuming to task.

Astra, led by serial entrepreneur and former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, wants to address this growing demand (which extends to commercial customers like Spire, Planet and others that are putting up large communications and Earth observation small satellite constellations) by producing rockets fast and with high frequency. Per the Bloomberg article, Astra says it can launch “profitably” for $2.5 million per mission, which is around half the going rate for a Rocket Lab launch, and that it eventually hopes to attain costs as low as $1 million per mission with a daily launch operational cadence. To that end, it’s looking to ramp production to a rate of producing hundreds of vehicles per year in a 250,000-square-foot manufacturing facility it’s setting up.

Astra is also different in that it’s using aluminum primarily in its launch vehicle, as opposed to the more costly but premium carbon fiber used by Rocket Lab in its Electron vehicle. And their launch platform is designed with mobility in mind, as the whole point is that it can be deployed responsively and globally on short notice. If Rocket Lab’s launcher is a finely crafted and engineered supercar, Astra’s is aiming to be a reliable, adequate daily compact commuter car.

Next up for Astra in terms of key milestones is a launch planned for February 21 from Kodiak, Alaska — an island spaceport owned and operated by Alaska Aerospace. The company has flown two suborbital test launches from this site, both in 2018, and both resulted in failures shortly following launch, so it’s got a lot to prove with this latest forthcoming attempt.

TechCrunch is hosting its first ever dedicated space event in 2020 – TechCrunch Sessions: Space, happening June 25 in LA. Get your tickets now!

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Rocket startup Astra emerges from stealth, aims to launch for as little as M per flight

Industrial robots are expensive. But, then, so are construction mistakes. Being off by an inch here or there adds up quickly, and too often crews need to correct costly errors. There’s a reason construction has become the next great target of the robotics and automation industries, with a number of startups vying to create solutions that can constantly monitor sites to detect mistakes before it’s too late.

TechCrunch’s Disrupt Berlin Battlefield winner Scaled Robotics this week is among the early-stage startups tackling the problem. This morning, the small Barcelona-based construction startup announced that it has raised a €2 million seed investment, led by European firms Norwegian Construct Venture and PropTech Fund Surplus. The funding follows a €1 million pre-seed.

Construction has become one of the key focuses of robotics investments in recent years, with names like Built, Toggle and Dusty raising rounds in the last year or so. Even Boston Dynamics is looking to get into the act, mounting lidar sensors to the top of its Spot robots, with construction listed as one of the primary use case for the commercialized version of the product.

Scaled’s robot is low to the ground, with four-wheels. Mounted up top are lasers and cameras that use SLAM technology to essentially build a 3D point map of a space. The map is then compared to a construction model of the space, and differences can be noted down to the centimeter. The robot’s mobility saves construction workers from having to lug around a tripod, as is the case with standard stationary laser scanners. 

“The tools being developed by Scaled Robotics not only provide a detailed analysis of the state of a construction project but also provide a centralized repository for all information relating to project quality and progress,” co-founder and CEO Stuart Maggs said in a release tied to the funding. “We envision that our products will allow this global $13 trillion industry to manage risk and uncertainty in ways that were previously impossible. We are very pleased to have Surplus Invest and Construct Venture on the team, both investors who share our vision of changing the industry through a combination of robotics and artificial intelligence.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Construction startup Scaled Robotics raises a €2M seed round

Those looking outside of Silicon Valley as a potential hub for their startup might want to take a gander at Utah, at least that’s the kind of trend the new Silicon Slopes Venture Fund hopes to create.

The newly formed fund, put together by Qualtrics co-founder Ryan Smith, Omniture and Domo founder Josh James and Stance co-founder turned Pelion Venture Partners’ Jeff Kearl, pledges to invest solely in Utah-based startups. The goal? To become every bit as notable as a16z or Sequoia Capital.

Qualtrics co-founder Ryan Smith and Domo and Omniture founder Josh James onstage at the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit.

“I grew up in the Bay Area,” Kearl told TechCrunch of the energy he feels in the state. “This feels like the 1990s in the Bay Area. You can find hundreds of open jobs up and down the Wasatch Front.”

Utah has a reputation as a mostly religious, conservative and sleepy mountain region for outdoors enthusiasts, but tech has fast become the leading job sector in the state, with some salaries from companies like Adobe and Qualtrics rivaling those in Silicon Valley. The state recently pledged a push to include at least one computer science course in every high school in the state by 2022. It also just hosted a massive, 25,000 person startup festival called the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit. The summit held a Utah state governor’s debate and both Steve Case and Mark Zuckerberg spoke on stage.

It’s unclear how much the fund has set aside for its mission to help Utah become a full-fledged tech ecosystem rivaling Silicon Valley but one would imagine it would have a sizable sum to invest, if, as Smith tells TechCrunch, it is to help Utah’s up-and-coming startups go all the way from seed stage to IPO.

“I want to see companies get even bigger than Qualtrics… and do it in this state,” Smith said. Qualtrics sold to SAP in 2019 for $8 billion, notably the largest private enterprise software deal in tech history.

Silicon Slopes Tech Summit 2020 Gubernatorial Debate

One of the many issues tech hubs around the world face is both the networking capabilities and the ability to invest after the early stage investment. Most startups throughout the globe still find the need to travel and make connections in Silicon Valley to get them through the next step of growth. This has been true for every billion-dollar startup idea in Utah as well so far. Both Smith and James took in Silicon Valley venture for their companies, as did unicorn turned public edtech startup Pluralsight and the recently rebranded sales platform Xant (formerly InsideSales) before making it big.

However, this new fund represents the kind of push needed to create a strong innovation ecosystem in the future, as Steve Case mentioned on stage at the summit event this last week. “Venture capitalists must look at ‘what’s happening in the Silicon Slopes’ and make sure it ‘is happening other places’,” Utah newspaper Deseret News paraphrased the AOL founder as saying.

Pelion Venture Partners, which operates in both Utah and Southern California, will act as a support to Silicon Slopes Venture Fund, providing organizational overhead. Each partner will still keep their day job and donate most fees to support the ongoing operation of the non-profit tech organization, Silicon Slopes, which runs the annual tech summit of the same moniker. However, the Silicon Slopes Venture Fund will be an independent fund from Pelion, with the sole purpose of investing in deal flow the three partners find through their respective networks within the state.

“I used to hate the term ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ because I want to be the only boat,” James told TechCrunch. “But I really think it applies here for what we are trying to do [in Utah].”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Utah tech magnates create new Silicon Slopes Venture Fund to boost startups in the state

Rocket launch startup Skyrora, an Edinburgh-based company that’s developing a new launch vehicle for small satellites, has successfully tested its new rocket engines in their first stationary ground-firings, a huge step on the way toward developing their launch vehicle. Skyrora’s rocket engines are novel not only in their use of 3D printing, but also because the fuel that powers them is developed from plastic waste — a new type of fuel called “Ecosene” the startup says makes its launch vehicles greener and more ecologically sound than the competition.

The rocket engine that Skyrora is testing will eventually power the final stage of its 22-meter (72-foot) Skyrora XL launch vehicle (closer to Rocket Lab’s Electron at 57 feet than SpaceX’s Falcon 9 at 229 feet), which will be capable of delivering multiple payloads to separate orbits ranging up to 500 km (310 miles) above Earth, a popular low-Earth orbit target range for small satellite payloads. Skyrora fired the engines both with its Ecosene fuel, which is its kerosene directed from waste plastics using a proprietary process, and with traditional kerosene RP-1 rocket fuel, giving the company the opportunity to compare the two fuel sources in terms of performance.

Skyrora says it can create around 600 kg (1,300 lbs) of kerosene form 1,000 kg (2,200 lbs) of plastic waste, and its fuel results in around 45% less greenhouse gas emissions. The Ecosene also has the advantage of not requiring cryogenic freezing, and it can be stored in tanks for long periods of time, something that the startup says helps it work particularly well for launch conditions from the Scottish spaceport from which the company plans to launch.

Ultimately, this is just one test on the path to validation and eventual launch, but Skyrora is encouraged by the results of this test, and it plans to fly its first Skyrora XL vehicles from its U.K.-based launch site starting in 2022.

TechCrunch is hosting its first ever dedicated space event in 2020 – TechCrunch Sessions: Space, happening June 25 in LA. Get your tickets now!

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Launch startup Skyrora successfully tests 3D-printed rocket engines powered by plastic waste

It’s a somewhat crude yardstick by which to measure innovation in deep tech — and the result perhaps reflects historic bias as much as it does actual leadership in innovation — but Europe leads every other continental region when it comes to the number of Nobel laureates it has produced in chemistry, medicine and physics.

These three categories are most closely associated with what we classify as deep tech: startups that don’t merely apply a technology layer or wrapper to an existing product, service or business model, but rather push forward ideas based on substantial, R&D-intensive and IP-protected, scientific advances and high-tech engineering innovation.

These advances — and the startups turning them into businesses — often originate from university research teams. On this front, Europe also leads the way as home to the two top-ranked universities in the world for quality of research, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Another European institution, ETH Zurich, rounds out the top 10.

However, if you rank universities around the world by the amount of venture capital investment secured by startups founded by their graduates, the top of the table takes on a distinctly American flavor, with Stanford (fourth in the research quality ranking) taking top spot ahead of eight other U.S. universities in the top 10 (including several that do not feature in the top 10 of the research quality ranking). Tel Aviv University is the sole European (depending on your definition) representative in the top 10 ranked by funding for spin-outs.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Europe risks squandering its global advantage in deep tech innovation

Japan’s tourism industry is booming, but it faces a hotel room shortage, especially in Tokyo as the country prepares for the Summer Olympics. H2O (the name stands for Hospitality 2.0) addresses the market opportunity with a platform that helps vacation rental owners manage their properties. The startup announced today it has raised $7 million in Series B funding from Samsung Ventures, Stonebridge Ventures, IMM Investment and Shinhan Capital, bringing its total raised to $18 million.

H2O allows owners to manage operations, housekeeping and bookings from different online travel agencies on its platform, lowering the cost of doing business. The company also recently launched H2O, a vacation rental brand, to expand its real estate development business, including a new hotel near Universal Studio Japan.

The company began in 2015 with Wahome in South Korea, a home cleaning service, before launching H2O two years later after acquiring several hospitality management companies in Japan, including a housekeeping service for vacation rentals. There are currently about 5,000 managed rooms connected to the platform, which is used by about 25 online travel agencies. Since the third-quarter of 2018, revenue has doubled every quarter, says founder and CEO John Lee.

Lee, who studied hotel administration at Cornell University and previously worked in banking at Morgan Stanley, told TechCrunch in an email that there were three market trends that made launching a hospitality business in Japan compelling:

1. Strong domestic tourism.
2. Increasing inbound tourism.
3. A huge shortage in accommodations.

H20 first focused on allowing flexible housekeeping bookings for vacation rental properties. Then in 2018, H2O expanded to full hospitality management services, including property, yield, revenue and operations.

Lee said he believes “the core value of the hospitality industry is how to increase the yield of the real estate. I always believed that managing one building with high fixed costs (front desk, housekeeping department, etc.) was very inefficient from building owners point of view.”

H2O’s property management system works by syncing three calendars: guests, rooms and housekeeping. All are linked and automated to prevent double bookings and make sure housecleaning services are available. This allows H2O’s software to manage revenue, inventory and yield on a per-droom basis and schedule guests and cleanings.

The platform also allows clients to manage multiple properties at once and offer smart locks, online check-ins and chat-based customer service.

In June 2019, Japan implemented the Housing and Accommodations Business Act (also called the minpaku law, after the Japanese term for private residences rented out as short-term accommodations, similar to properties on AirBnb), formally legalizing and regulating vacation rental management. Lee says the new regulation allowed more real estate investors, who already owned other types of hospitality properties, to enter the minpaku market. H2O manages properties under four licenses, including hotel, ryokan and kanishokuksho, but the majority of its properties are under the minpaku law, which allowed it to grow its B2B business.

The average daily rate for accommodations on H2O was around $160 in 2019, with an average occupancy rate of 87 percent. Of the property owners who use H2O, 70 percent are real estate property managers, 20 percent are local property owners and 10 percent are overseas real estate funds. About 60 percent of guests who use H2O to book accommodations are inbound travelers (of that number, 40 percent are from China, 40 percent are from Southeast Asia, 10 percent are from South Korea and 10 percent are from other countries), while the rest are domestic tourists.

In press statement, Eric Kim, senior investment manager at Samsung Ventures, said “We’re pleased to be part of the fastest-growing hospitality company in Japan. H2O has already proven product market fit within Japan, and we expect them to continue to thrive as they expand outside of major cities.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Japanese vacation rental management startup H2O raises million Series B from investors including Samsung Ventures

When Uber and Lyft went public, it wasn’t the drivers who got rich — it was the executives, investors and some early employees. In an era when it has become clear that tech executives and investors are frequently the only ones who’ll reap rewards for a company’s success, cooperative startups are getting more attention.

Depending on how it’s set up, a cooperative model offers workers and users true ownership and control in a company; any profits that are generated are returned to the members or reinvested in the company.

Co-ops aren’t new: The nation’s longest-running example is The Philadelphia Contributionship, a mutually owned insurance company founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1752. In 1895, the International Co-operative Alliance formed to serve as a way to unite cooperatives across the world. Some colleges have student-run housing co-ops where cleaning, food preparation and other responsibilities are shared. Today, there are many well-known large-scale co-ops, including outdoor recreation store REI, Arizmendi Bakery in San Francisco and Blue Diamond Growers, one of the world’s largest tree-nut processors.

What’s novel, however, is applying the co-op model to technology startups. Start.coop, an accelerator for cooperative startups, is just one group trying to facilitate that practice.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | The case for cooperative tech startups

Justin Kan was talking about the systems in his life. The serial entrepreneur/founder, who recently announced a pivot and significant layoffs at Atrium, his latest venture, came to speak at last fall’s TechCrunch Disrupt in high-fashion black sweats and an extremely colorful pair of Nikes.

After Kan wrapped up his panel, we sat down for a wide-ranging and philosophical interview. And as we left off in part one of our conversation, Kan was explaining his self-described Buddhist philosophy of life.

But in the second part of our interview, I wanted to focus more on Kan’s thoughts about systems in society as a whole. There’s a difference, after all, between working mindfully to change oneself and doing so to change society. As we’ve seen with Adam Neumann, among others, there is a certain class of “spiritual” Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who use their platform in tech to assuage their own inner suffering — and perhaps gain influence by helping similarly influential people alleviate their own. WeWork, for example, cultivated associations with everything from Kabbalah to Deepak Chopra to mindful eating before the company melted under the heat of its own ethical challenges.

I don’t know that there is evidence to place Kan in the above category; maybe he is better understood as a legitimate, if unconventional, Big Thinker. But either way, it would be important to ask: What good is it when tech leaders like Kan seek a Buddhist alleviation of suffering, if the industries that sustain them are, at scale, currently creating enormous and very tangible suffering for countless millions of less fortunate people?

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Justin Kan opens up (Part 2)