Category: Tech news

There’s been quite a bit of movement in the additive manufacturing space in recent months. If I had to pinpoint a reason, I would say that — much like robotics (another space I follow fairly closely) — the category has gotten a boost in interest from the pandemic. Medical applications are understandably of interest lately, as is alternative manufacturing.

Desktop Metal, Markforged and new-comer Mantel have all made pretty big announcements in recent weeks, and now Fortify is making the round with a significant raise. The Boston-based startup announced a $20 million Series B equity round, led by Cota Capital with additional participation from Accel Partners, Neotribe Ventures and Prelude Ventures.

Fortify is attempting to stake out a claim in material deposits. Using digital light processing (DLP) tech, the company can mix and print in a variety of different materials, with a wide range of properties. The list includes some useful traits, including electromagnetic and thermal.

Like Mantel, the company looks to be targeting manufacturing tools, including injection molding.

“Fortify has been focused on proving the viability of our product and market opportunity over the past 18+ months, and exceeded our goals set at the beginning of 2020,” CEO Josh Martin said in a release. “This next round will expand our go-to-market footprint in key verticals such as injection mold tooling while enabling us to capture market share in end-use electronic devices.”

Recent months have also found the company enlisting other 3D printing vets. Paul Dresens (ex Desktop Metal) signed on as VP of Engineering, while former GrabCad (a Stratasys acquisition) market exec Rob Stevens has signed on as an advisor.

 

Ford said Thursday that some some Ford F-150 pickup trucks and Edge crossover without certain electronic modules due to a twofold punch of a global semiconductor shortage and a lack of parts caused a winter storm.

Ford said it will build and hold the vehicles for a number of weeks, then ship the vehicles to dealers once the modules are available and comprehensive quality checks are complete. The automaker also said it is canceling shifts tonight and Friday at Louisville Assembly Plant due to the semiconductor-related part shortage. Ford said production of the Escape and Lincoln Corsair is expected to resume Monday on short shifts, with full production scheduled to resume Tuesday.

Ford isn’t alone in its decision to build vehicles without certain parts as the global chip shortage drags on. GM said earlier this week that certain pickup trucks would be produced without a fuel management module, a device that will prevent these vehicles from achieving top fuel economy performance.

Both Ford and GM have previously issued guidance that the chip shortage will impact its financial results in 2021. Ford has said that if the semiconductor shortage scenario is extended through the first half of 2021, the shortage could lower its between $1 billion and $2.5 billion, net of cost recoveries and some production make-up in the second half of the year. GM said in February that the global shortage of semiconductors will have a short-term impact on its production, earnings and cash flow in 2021.

Fort Robotics today announced a $13 million raise. Led by Prime Movers Lab, the round also features Prologis Ventures, Quiet Capital, Lemnos Labs, Creative Ventures, Ahoy Capital, Compound, FundersClub and Mark Cuban.

The Philadelphia-based company was founded in 2018 by Samuel Reeves, who previous headed up Humanistic Robotics. That fellow Pennsylvania startup is focused on landmine and IED-clearing remote operating robotic systems.

The newer company is focused more on safety software, for collaborative robotics and other autonomous systems. Among the other issues being tackled by the company is cybersecurity vulnerability among these sots of workplace robotics. Other issues targeted here include broader system failure and potential human error.

The company says it currently works with 100 companies across a wide spectrum of categories, from warehouse fulfillment and manufacturing to delivery and transportation.

“The world is on the cusp of a new industrial revolution in mobile automation,” Reeves said in a release tied to the news. “With added investment and support, we’ll be able to rapidly scale the company to capitalize on the convergence of trend and opportunity to ensure that robotic systems are safely deployed across all industries.”

We’ve seen a fair bit of investment excitement around robotics in the past year, owing to increased interest in automation during the pandemic. Fort is well-positioned in that respect, with a solution aimed a fairly wide range of different verticals within the category.

 

MrBeast’s management company is getting into the venture business.

Night Media, the six-year-old, Dallas-based multimedia talent management company, is closing a debut fund with $20 million in capital commitments from the powerful family-friendly online influencers it manages, along with other social media stars.

The idea, says Night Media CEO Reed Duchscher, is to write initial checks of up to $300,000 into three categories: consumer-facing startups; gaming startups, especially those centered around user-generated content; and the creator economy, including startups supporting the creator economy.

The last is a world that Duchscher knows particularly well.

A native North Dakotan who was a wide receiver for North Dakota State University, Duchscher was working for a sports agency after graduating when he stumbled across a comedy group online called Dude Perfect. He so loved their work that he reached out to better understand who its members are and how they made money; within months, Duchscher struck out on his own to work full-time with the group and seize on what appeared to be a big opportunity.

It was a savvy move. While Night Media no longer works with Dude Perfect, it now manages 16 other top influencer groups, with YouTube stars that include ZHC (19.7 million subscribers), Preston (15.6 million), Matt Stonie (13.7 million), Unspeakable (10.8 million), Azzyland (13.3 million), Typical Gamer (11.4 million) and Carter Sharer (7.6 million).

The crown jewel of the portfolio, so to speak, is MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson and who has amassed 55 million subscribers on YouTube. He posts two to three videos each month that routinely rack up at least 30 million views. In a Bloomberg piece in December about Donaldson, famed filmmaker Casey Neistat said of him: “He lives on a different planet than the rest of the YouTube world.”

Some might settle for that level of success. Duchscher — who met Donaldson after sending him a direct message on Twitter — has instead been helping Donaldson and his other clients think about next steps.

Last year, toward that end, Night Media created a venture studio to incubate companies that its stars can help shape and grow. One of those efforts is MrBeastBurger, wherein Donaldson has partnered with 300 ghost kitchens around the country to sell so-called Beast Burgers and other items that can be ordered through a dedicated app. Donaldson has also put his stamp on the second iteration of a game called Finger on the App.

Asked if either the food brand or the app might be open to follow-on funding, Duchscher suggests that’s not necessarily the plan for the startups in the venture studio, though they are open to outside funding “depending on what we’d do with all that capital.” Venture-type investment, he adds, could create unnecessary “complexity” in some cases.

At the same time, Night Media’s talent is interested in learning, molding and capitalizing from the trends impacting their industry. Enter the new venture fund, which could be the start of a much bigger business eventually.

Indeed, though a professional investor is joining the outfit this spring, Duchscher has himself been running the show and spending time with “people in the Valley and L.A. who have been in industry for 20 years and been through multiple funds and financial crises” in order to learn more about institutional investing. He cites Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, for example, as firms that are already sending him deal flow.

As for whether he’s also receiving advice from celebrity investors on the startup scene, Duchscher says there’s less of that, though he adds he has talked quite a bit with Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures and even pulled the firm into a few deals, including Backbone, a company that makes a sleek game controller for iPhones.

It’s one of roughly a dozen startups that Night Media has helped fund to date. Another bet is a rewards app that pays users in bitcoin called Lolli and which is also backed by Craft Ventures and famed talent agent Guy Oseary. Night Media also invested in Pearpop, a startup that invites fans to bid for shared screen time with their favorite TikTok. Italic, a marketplace that invites shoppers to buy luxury products directly from the manufacturers behind top brands, is a portfolio company, too.

All have agreed to work with Night Media in exchange for access to its creators and their know-how — assets that Duchscher believes gives the outfit an edge that most VCs can’t offer.

Whether it all leads to a stronger focus on venture capital down the road is the question, and Duchscher isn’t spending much energy on it right now, he suggests. “It would depend on fund one and how quickly it gets deployed,” he says. “We’re not going to raise because we can. That’s never been the way we think or operate.”

He has more pressing concerns, in any case. A big part of his job is figuring out what to do with inbound interest in his clients, and there’s far more demand right now than there is inventory.

“Usually, people want to work with a specific creator,” he notes, and there are only so many hours in the day.

YouTube Shorts comes to the U.S., Amazon starts testing electric delivery vans in San Francisco and new data suggests the impact of Google Play’s recent changes. This is your Daily Crunch for March 18, 2021.

The big story: YouTube’s TikTok rival launches in the US

The YouTube Shorts product allows users to record, edit and share videos of 60 seconds or less, which can be accompanied by licensed music from a variety of industry partners. The company has been testing the feature in India while making Shorts viewable internationally — but until today, U.S. viewers couldn’t actually create short videos of their own.

Sarah Perez took an in-depth look at the Shorts experience, noting that it’s pretty similar to TikTok while lacking some key features, such as intelligent sound syncing.

The tech giants

Amazon begins testing its Rivian electric delivery vans in San Francisco — This makes SF the second of 16 total cities that Amazon expects to bring its Rivian-sourced EVs to in 2021.

Data shows how few Google Play developers will pay the higher 30% commission after policy change — As regular Daily Crunch readers will remember, Google recently announced that it’s cutting the commissions it charges developers on Google Play.

Twitter begins testing a way to watch YouTube videos from the home timeline on iOS — Shortly after Twitter announced it would begin testing a better way to display images on its app, it’s now doing the same for YouTube videos.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Substack faces backlash over the writers it supports with big advances — The startup has lured some of its most high-profile (and controversial) writers with sizable payments.

Homebrew backs Higo’s effort to become the ‘Venmo for B2B payments’ in LatAm — Rodolfo Corcuera, Juan José Fernández and Daniel Tamayo founded the company in January 2020, recognizing that the process of paying vendors for business owners is largely “manual and cumbersome.”

NFT marketplace OpenSea raises $23M from a16z — OpenSea has been one of a handful of NFT marketplaces to explode in popularity in recent weeks.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

MaaS transit: The business of mobility as a service — Amid declining ridership, transportation agencies find new software partners.

Three steps to ease the transition to a no-code company — Despite the many benefits, adopting a no-code platform won’t suddenly turn you into a no-code company.

Snowflake gave up its dual-class shares. Should you? — The mechanism can enable founders to maintain control despite later dilution and may sometimes even grant ironclad control in perpetuity.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Tech companies should oppose the new wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation — TechNet’s David Edmondson puts the spotlight on a number of states that are currently considering anti-LGBT legislation.

Talking robots with Ford — We interview Ford’s Technical Expert Mario Santillo about its new robotics initiatives.

Startups, get your bug bounty crash course at Early Stage 2021 — Katie Moussouris, founder and chief executive at Luta Security, will give a crash course in bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure programs at TC Early Stage 2021.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Substack has attracted a number of high-profile writers to its newsletter platform — and it’s not a secret that the venture-backed startup has lured some of them with sizable payments.

For example, a New Yorker article late last year identified several writers (Anne Helen Petersen, Matthew Yglesias) who’d accepted “substantial” advances, and others (Robert Christgau, Alison Roman) who’d started Substack newsletters without striking deals with the company.

However, a number of writers publishing via Substack have begun arguing that this strategy makes the company seem less like a technology platform and more like a media company (a familiar debate around Facebook and other online giants) — or at the very least, like a technology platform that also makes editorial decisions subject to scrutiny and criticism.

Last week, the writer Jude Ellison Sady Doyle pointed to writers like Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald and Freddie deBoer (several of whom departed larger publications, supposedly turning to Substack for greater editorial independence) and suggested that the platform has become “famous for giving massive advances [ … ] to people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.”

Doyle initially said that they would continue publishing via Substack but would not charge a subscription fee to any readers who (like Doyle) identify as trans. Later, they added an update saying they’d be moving to a different platform called Ghost.

Science journalist and science fiction writer Annalee Newitz wrote yesterday that they would be leaving the platform as well. As part of their farewell, they described Substack as a “scam”: “For all we know, every single one of Substack’s top newsletters is supported by money from Substack. Until Substack reveals who exactly is on its payroll, its promises that anyone can make money on a newsletter are tainted.”

Substack has responded with two posts of its own. In the first, published last week, co-founder Hamish McKenzie outlined the details of what the company calls its Substack Pro program — it offers select writers an advance payment for their first year on the platform, then keeps 85% of the writers’ subscription revenue. After that year, there’s no guaranteed payment, but writers get to keep 90% of their revenue. (The company also offers legal support and healthcare stipends.)

“We see these deals as business decisions, not editorial ones,” McKenzie wrote. “We don’t commission or edit stories. We don’t hire writers, or manage them. The writers, not Substack, are the owners. No one writes for Substack — they write for their own publications.”

The second post (bylined by McKenzie and his co-founders Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi) provides additional details about who’s in the program — more than half women, more than one-third people of color, diverse viewpoints but “none that can be reasonably construed as anti-trans” — without actually naming names.

“So far, the small number of writers who have chosen to share their deals — coupled with some wrong assumptions about who might be part of the program — has created a distorted perception of the overall makeup of the group, leading to incorrect inferences about Substack’s business strategy,” the Substack founders wrote.

As for whether those writers are being held to any standards, the founders said, “We will continue to require all writers to abide by Substack’s content guidelines, which guard against harassment and threats. But we will also stick to a hands-off approach to censorship, as laid out in our statement about our content moderation philosophy.”

Greenwald, for his part, dismissed the criticism as “petty Substack censors” whose position boils down to, “because you refuse to remove from your platform the writers I hate who have built a very large readership of their own, I’m taking myself and my couple of dozen readers elsewhere in protest.”

But when I reached out to Newitz (a friend of mine) via email, they told me that the key issue is transparency.

“If Substack won’t tell us who they are paying, we can’t figure out who on the site has grown their audience organically, and who is getting juiced,” Newitz said. “It’s blatantly misleading for people who are trying to figure out whether they can make money on the platform. Plus, keeping their Pro list secret means we can’t verify Substack’s claims about how its staff writers are on ‘all sides’ of the political spectrum.”

Snowflake announced earlier this month that it would give up its dual-class shareholder structure, a corporate governance setup that often gives founders and executives superior voting rights, typically involving 10 times as many votes for their own shares as others receive. The mechanism can enable founders to maintain control despite later dilution and may sometimes even grant ironclad control to an individual in perpetuity.

For many companies, these supervoting shares represent a highly powerful tool, allowing founders to have their cake and eat it, too — to go public and receive the advantages of being a public company while limiting the power of external shareholders to influence how they run the company once it floats.

Some founders and their investors argue that these preferred shares protect them from the short-term whims of the market, but the perspective isn’t universally accepted. Dual-class shares are a controversial governance structure, and some wonder if they are setting up an unfair playing field by allowing a cabal to wield outsized power.

Why would Snowflake give up such a powerful tool a mere six months after it went public? We decided to look at the notion of dual-class shares and why Snowflake may have been willing to let them go.

Snowflake’s decision

If one of the primary purposes of dual-class shares is to consolidate CEO power, then perhaps Snowflake felt they weren’t necessary, given the history of CEO-shuffling at the company. While Snowflake’s founders are still part of the organization, they hired Sutter Hill investor Mike Speiser to be their first CEO, followed by former Microsoft exec Bob Muglia before finally bringing in veteran CEO Frank Slootman to take their company public.

Without an all-powerful CEO founder in place, perhaps the company felt that supervoting shares weren’t necessary. Regardless, Snowflake CFO Mike Scarpelli framed the move as a decision that works for all parties when he announced that his company would abandon the special shares during its earnings call earlier this month.

“Today, we announced that on March 1st, 2021, our Class B shareholders in accordance with our governing documents converted all of our Class B common stock to Class A common stock, eliminating the dual-class structure of our common stock and ensuring that each share has an equal vote. We view this as operationally beneficial to the company and our shareholders,” Scarpelli said during the call.

NASA doesn’t just let anyone launch whatever they want to space without checking in with the agency about potential impacts to its own assets on orbit, including the International Space Station (ISS). The agency has a standard set of guidelines around so-called “Conjunction Assessment,” which is basically to determine the risk that a close approach between in-space objects might occur, which in turn could potentially result in a collision. This assessment determines when and where something flies, as you might expect.

Today, NASA published a new agreement between itself and SpaceX that goes above and beyond its standard Conjunction Assessment practices. The special agreement, which exists under the mandate of the Space Act that allows NASA to work with any company in order to fulfill its mandate, is defined as a “nonreimbursable” one, or just one in which no money changes hands, which is designed to benefit both parties involved.

It effectively lays out that because SpaceX operates Starlink, which is the largest existing on-orbit constellation of spacecraft, and which is growing at a rapid pace, and because each of these is equipped with the ability to maneuver itself autonomously in response to mission parameters, there needs to exist a deeper ongoing partnership between NASA and SpaceX for conjunction avoidance.

Accordingly, the agreement outlines the ways in which communication and information sharing between NASA and SpaceX will exceed what has been typically been expected. For NASA’s part, it’ll be providing detailed and accurate info about its planned missions in advance to SpaceX so that they can use that to properly program Starlink’s automated avoidance measures whenever a mission is happening where NASA assets might cross paths with the constellation. It’ll also be working directly with SpaceX on improving its ability to assess and avoid any incidents, and will be providing technical support on how SpaceX might better mitigate “photometric brightness,” or the reflectivity of its Starlink spacecraft.

Meanwhile, SpaceX will be responsible for ensuring its Starlink satellites take “evasive action” to “mitigate close approaches and avoid collisions with all NASA assets.” It’ll also be required to provide time frame “cut-outs” for periods when Starlink satellites aren’t able to employ their collision avoidance, which mostly occurs during the phase right after they’re launched when they’re still being activated and put into their target orbits.

Another key point in the agreement is that SpaceX plan Starlink launches so they’re at minimum either 5 km above or below the highest and lowest points of the International Space Station’s orbit as it makes its way around the Earth. Finally, SpaceX is also expected to share its own analysis of the effectiveness of its satellite dimming techniques, so the agency can adjust its own guidance on the subject accordingly.

The full agreement is embedded below, but the main takeaway is that NASA clearly wants SpaceX to be a better low-Earth partner and citizen as the size of its constellation pushes past the 1,200 mark, on track to grow to around 1,500 or more by year’s end. Also, NASA’s putting a lot of trust and responsibility in SpaceX’s hands — basically it’s laying out that Starlink’s built-in autonomous capabilities can avoid any really danger that might arise. The way NASA has structured this document also leaves open the possibility that it could repurpose it for other constellation operators — a growing need, given the number of companies working on networks of low-Earth orbit spacecraft.

OpenSea has been one of a handful of NFT marketplaces to explode in popularity in recent weeks as collectors wade into the trading of nonfungible tokens on the blockchain. While new startups have been popping up everyday, platforms that launched in crypto’s earlier times are receiving rampant attention from investors who see this wave of excitement for cryptocurrencies and tokens as much different than the ones that preceded it.

Today, the startup announced that it’s closed a $23 million round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from a laundry list of angels and firms including Naval Ravikant, Mark Cuban, Alexis Ohanian, Dylan Field and Linda Xie.

OpenSea launched back in 2017, announcing a $2 million round a few months later from Founders Fund and a few crypto centric firms. At the time CryptoKitties mania was most of what Ethereum had to offer and early NFT projects were being slowly embraced by a community that was enthusiastic but more curious than anything.

Fast forward to 2021 and NFTs are certainly having a moment, and while the specific shades of that moment may be heavily focused on high-dollar artwork sales from traditional auction houses or NFT memes being tweeted out by Elon Musk, proponents see a future for the tokens that upends the economics of content creation and influence on the internet. The enthusiasm accompanies a months-long rally in the value of cryptocurrencies themselves that have taken Ethereum and Bitcoin to multiples of previous all-time highs.

The market for digital goods expanding widely may depend heavily on further adoption among gaming giants and larger media organizations, but early on there’s hope that digital-first creators can use these marketplaces to connect more directly with fans and begin to bypass the massive platforms they depend on now.

There are still some early hiccups as the tech develops. While Ethereum has committed to moving from its energy-intensive proof-of-work standard to a more efficient proof-of-stake one eventually, the existing structure has been far from efficient, which has opened many of the early NFT artists to criticism surrounding climate change concerns and whether the stakeholders in crypto tokens should be prioritizing environmental worries over the specific challenges of certain proofs. In February, OpenSea announced support for more efficient Tezos-based NFTs.

A more nebulous challenge for marketplaces like OpenSea may be cutting through the noise of speculation and providing a marketplace for more users that are actually buying to own, an especially difficult proposition given the breakneck pace of growth for the digital currencies being used to purchase the digital goods themselves.

Rivian, the EV startup backed by Amazon, Cox Automotive and T. Rowe Price, plans to install more than 10,000 chargers by the end of 2023. The network will have a dual purpose: quickly power its electric vehicle models with fast chargers installed along highways and provide Level 2 chargers at further afield locations next to parks, trailheads and other adventurous destinations.

The company said Thursday that its so-called Rivian Adventure Network will include more than 3,500 DC fast chargers at over 600 sites, which will only be accessible to owners of its electric vehicles. Each site will have multiple chargers and located on highways and main roads, often by cafes and shops, the company said in a blog post Thursday.

Rivian is also installing thousands of “waypoint” Level 2 AC chargers throughout the United States and Canada. These waypoint chargers will have a 11.5 kW charging speed, which should be able add up to 25 miles of range every hour for its R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV. The waypoint chargers will be strategically located along and near routes that Rivian customers are likely to take. They will be found at shopping centers restaurants, hotels, campsites and parks. The first of these waypoints, which will be open to the public and accessible to all electric vehicle brands with a J1772 plug, are being installed at all 42 Colorado State Parks. Each park will have two Rivian Waypoints each, with installation starting in July, the company said.

The decision to add this second layer of electric vehicle chargers is a direct appeal to Rivian’s customer base and one required to build confidence in the brand and electric vehicles, in general, Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe told TechCrunch late last year during a wide-ranging interview about charging, batteries and automated driving.

Rivian’s approach is similar to Tesla with a few distinct differences. Tesla has built a proprietary network of more than 20,000 Superchargers, which are typically located next to highways and busy commuter corridors, and destination chargers installed at high-end hotels, restaurants and other spots an owner of a Model 3, Model S, Model Y or Model X might visit.

Rivian’s waypoint chargers serve the same purpose — albeit different kinds of locations — to the Tesla destination chargers. However, unlike Tesla’s chargers, Rivian’s waypoint site are open to the public and use the J1772 plug, a North American standard for electrical connectors for electric vehicles.

As part of its announcement, Rivian shared an image of a map of its fast chargers, indicating where they will be located. The map is not yet interactive, making it difficult to provide exact locations, but it appears that there are fast chargers located near Grand Canyon National Park as well as Zion National Park in Utah.

Rivian owners will be able to locate the waypoints as well as its branded fast chargers through the vehicle’s navigation and the accompanying app. Drivers will also be able to use the app or in-car system to and monitor charge status.

Rivian’s vehicles are equipped with a direct current connector used for rapid charging called Combined Charging System (CCS). CCS is an open international standard that in recent years has gained popularity in Europe and North America. This means that Rivian trucks and SUVs can also use any third-party CCS charging station without having to use an adapter.

The company indicated that the entire charging network will be powered by 100% renewable energy. That doesn’t mean that there will be a solar panel and energy storage system. Rivian clarified to TechCrunch at there will not be solar or wind on site. Instead, the 100% renewable energy goal will be achieved through partnerships with electricity providers. Rivian said it will use wind and solar wherever possible along with Renewable Energy Certificates to offset other power sources.

Building out such a large network will require capital, which Rivian hasn’t had trouble accessing. Rivian announced in January that it had raised $2.65 billion in a round led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc. Fidelity Management and Research Company, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Coatue and D1 Capital Partners as well as several other existing and new investors also participated, which pushed Rivian’s valuation to $27.6 billion, according to a person familiar with the investment round.

Determined early-stage startup founders (are there really any other kind?) always keep a sharp eye out for advantages that help them build better and faster. Well, heads up folks because this is a brand-new opportunity like no other, and it takes place at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23.

We’re talking about Startup Alley+, a curated experience available to only 50 early-stage startups who exhibit in Startup Alley at Disrupt 2021. All exhibiting startups are eligible, and the TechCrunch team will ultimately select which companies earn a spot. What’s in store for the Startup Alley+ cohort? So glad you asked.

Let’s get the money issue out of the way. You won’t pay anything beyond what you paid for your Startup Alley Pass. Sweet! Now get ready because Startup Alley+ provides plenty of opportunities for exposure and business growth — before Disrupt 2021 even begins.

Get set up for success with access to founder masterclasses. Warm up your pitching arm because you’ll take part in a pitch-off at Extra Crunch Live and receive invaluable feedback. What’s more, TechCrunch will introduce you to top investors within the startup community through our inaugural VC match-making program. A warm introduction beats a cold pitch any day, amirite?

And the perks just keep coming. Startup Alley+ gives participants a healthy head start on their Disrupt experience. How healthy? It begins in July at TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising, a virtual event the Startup Alley+ cohort attends for free.

With all those experiences under your belt, you’ll be ready to hit the virtual ground running — and reap the rewards — when you set up shop in the Alley at Disrupt.

Don’t forget about the many benefits available to all Startup Alley exhibitors. The virtual nature of Disrupt means thousands of people from around the globe will attend — influencers of every stripe including tech icons, leading founders, top investors, engineers, job seeking talent and entrepreneurs.

We’ve created more ways to add value and to draw attention to Startup Alley. For instance, every exhibiting startup gets to deliver a 60-second elevator pitch during a breakout feedback session. Your audience? TechCrunch staff and thousands of those Disrupt attendees we mentioned earlier.

We’re also rolling out the Startup Alley Crawl experience again. Every tech category will have an hour-long crawl posted in the agenda. Team TechCrunch will go live from the Disrupt Stage and interview a select number of founders in Startup Alley from each category. This could be you.

As a Startup Alley participant, you might just be selected to be a Startup Battlefield Wild Card. The Startup Battlefield is the stuff of legend. Past winners include the likes of Vurb, Dropbox, Mint and Yammer. Two Startup Alley exhibitors — chosen by the TechCrunch Editorial team — will compete in this year’s Battlefield and have a shot at the $100,000 (equity-free) cash.

Grab every advantage. Don’t miss your chance to participate in Startup Alley+, which kicks off in July. Apply for your Startup Alley Pass now and get ready to make the most of your time at in September at Disrupt 2021.

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

An artificial retina would be an enormous boon to the many people with visual impairments, and the possibility is creeping closer to reality year by year. One of the latest advancements takes a different and very promising approach, using tiny dots that convert light to electricity, and virtual reality has helped show that it could be a viable path forward.

These photovoltaic retinal prostheses come from the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, where Diego Ghezzi has been working on the idea for several years now.

Early retinal prosthetics were created decades ago, and the basic idea is as follows: A camera outside the body (on a pair of glasses, for instance) sends a signal over a wire to a tiny microelectrode array, which consists of many tiny electrodes that pierce the nonfunctioning retinal surface and stimulate the working cells directly.

The problems with this are mainly that powering and sending data to the array requires a wire running from outside the eye in — generally speaking a “don’t” when it comes to prosthetics and the body in general. The array itself is also limited in the number of electrodes it can have by the size of each, meaning for many years the effective resolution in the best case scenario was on the order of a few dozen or hundred “pixels.” (The concept doesn’t translate directly because of the way the visual system works.)

Ghezzi’s approach obviates both these problems with the use of photovoltaic materials, which turn light into an electric current. It’s not so different from what happens in a digital camera, except instead of recording the charge as in image, it sends the current into the retina like the powered electrodes did. There’s no need for a wire to relay power or data to the implant, because both are provided by the light shining on it.

In the case of the EPFL prosthesis, there are thousands of tiny photovoltaic dots, which would in theory be illuminated by a device outside the eye sending light in according to what it detects from a camera. Of course, it’s still an incredibly difficult thing to engineer. The other part of the setup would be a pair of glasses or goggles that both capture an image and project it through the eye onto the implant.

We first heard of this approach back in 2018, and things have changed somewhat since then, as a new paper documents.

“We increased the number of pixels from about 2,300 to 10,500,” explained Ghezzi in an email to TechCrunch. “So now it is difficult to see them individually and they look like a continuous film.”

Of course when those dots are pressed right up against the retina it’s a different story. After all, that’s only 100×100 pixels or so if it were a square — not exactly high definition. But the idea isn’t to replicate human vision, which may be an impossible task to begin with, let alone realistic for anyone’s first shot.

“Technically it is possible to make pixel smaller and denser,” Ghezzi explained. “The problem is that the current generated decreases with the pixel area.”

So the more you add, the tougher it is to make it work, and there’s also the risk (which they tested) that two adjacent dots will stimulate the same network in the retina. But too few and the image created may not be intelligible to the user. 10,500 sounds like a lot, and it may be enough — but the simple fact is that there’s no data to support that. To start on that the team turned to what may seem like an unlikely medium: VR.

Because the team can’t exactly do a “test” installation of an experimental retinal implant on people to see if it works, they needed another way to tell whether the dimensions and resolution of the device would be sufficient for certain everyday tasks like recognizing objects and letters.

To do this, they put people in VR environments that were dark except for little simulated “phosphors,” the pinpricks of light they expect to create by stimulating the retina via the implant; Ghezzi likened what people would see to a constellation of bright, shifting stars. They varied the number of phosphors, the area they appear over, and the length of their illumination or “tail” when the image shifted, asking participants how well they could perceive things like a word or scene.

Their primary finding was that the most important factor was visual angle — the overall size of the area where the image appears. Even a clear image is difficult to understand if it only takes up the very center of your vision, so even if overall clarity suffers it’s better to have a wide field of vision. The robust analysis of the visual system in the brain intuits things like edges and motion even from sparse inputs.

This demonstration showed that the implant’s parameters are theoretically sound and the team can start working toward human trials. That’s not something that can happen in a hurry, and while this approach is very promising compared with earlier, wired ones, it will still be several years even in the best case scenario before it’s possible it could be made widely available. Still, the very prospect of a working retinal implant of this type is an exciting one and we’ll be following it closely.

Google this week announced its was cutting the commissions it charges Android app developers who publish on its Google Play marketplace, following a similar move by Apple last year aimed at fending off antitrust claims. According to Google’s own estimates, 99% of its developers who sell goods and services would see their fees cut in half, as a result of the move that reduces the 30% commission to 15% on the first million dollars a developer earns. Now, data shared by App Annie helps to further illustrate the distribution of earnings on the Google Play Store, as well as how that compares with Apple’s counterpart.

According to App Annie, the vast majority (97.9%) of Google Play publishers made less than $1 million in annual consumer spend in 2020, which allows them to qualify for this reduced commission. But it’s worth noting that the way Google has implemented its new policy is different from Apple, as it will reduce the commission on the “first” $1 million in revenue made during the year — not make $1 million the threshold that triggers a commission increase, like Apple is doing. That means more developers could benefit from Google’s policy change.

It’s interesting to see how few developers across Google Play will ever have to worry about the higher commission bracket. The majority are seeing very small returns from their paid downloads, in-app purchases or subscription offering, the data indicates. This has been an ongoing trend for Android apps, in fact, reflecting Android’s traction in emerging markets where consumers don’t often spend on apps, which has forced many developers to lean on ads in addition to in-app purchases to generate revenues.

According to App Annie, 85,381 Google Play developers in 2020 generated less than $100,000 in consumer spend. 3,404 generated $100,000 to $500,000.

Only 568 developers began to even near the $1 million figure, with consumer spend of $500,000 to $750,000 in 2020. Then there were just 359 developers making $750,000 up to that first million.

The groups that would actually see the 30% commission apply to some of their sales were very small.

Just 215 developers saw consumer spend of $1 million to $1.25 million. Only 512 developers made between $1.25 million and $2 million. And then there’s the most profitable group, where 1,308 developers made over $2 million in revenue in 2020.

This distribution pattern where the largest group of developers is making under $100,000 and a sliver of the market was pulling in larger figures, including the over $2 million bracket, was similar to Apple’s App Store in 2020. But in Apple’s case, it sees more developers earning a decent income in the other sub-$1-million brackets than Google Play does.

The reason why Apple may have decided to charge a higher commission for developers making over $1 million is also reflected in these charts. Apple simply has more developers who qualify by making over $1 million per year. (On iOS, 3,611 developers make $1 million or more on the App Store versus 2,035 developers on Google Play).

In other words, these policy changes help a large majority of mobile app developers by allowing them to take home more money, and they give Apple and Google a good way to demonstrate to regulators that they’re not wielding their market power against the “little guy.”

For example, App Annie says that publishers making up to $1 million in consumer spend only comprised 5% of total Google Play consumer spend in 2020, even though 94% of Google Play apps offer some sort of in-app purchase mechanism.

But ultimately, the new policies have far less impact on the revenue the platforms themselves are pulling in via commissions. However, Google’s rule makes it simpler and more fair for developers who are still trying to grow their businesses despite crossing the $1 million threshold.

In 2019, St. Louis Metro Transit was struggling to keep customers. Uber and Lyft, along with dockless shared bikes and scooters, had flooded streets, causing ridership to fall more than 7% in a single year.

The agency didn’t try to fight for attention. Instead, it embraced its competitors.

Metro Transit dropped its internal trip-planning app, which had been developed with the Trapeze Group and directed riders to Transit, a private third-party app that offers mapping and real-time transit data in more than 200 cities. That app also included micromobility and ride-hailing information, allowing customers to not just look up bus schedules, but see how they might get to and from stops — or ignore the bus altogether.

The following year, Metro Transit partnered with mobile ticketing company Masabi and added a payment option on some bus routes. Now, the agency is planning an all-in-one app — via third-party providers Transit and Masabi — where customers could plan and book end-to-end trips across trains, buses, bikes, scooters and taxis.

“What we do best is transporting large volumes of people on vehicles and managing mass transit,” said Metro Transit executive director Jessica Mefford-Miller. “On the software side, there are a lot of players out there doing great stuff that can help us meet our customers where they are and make trip planning as easy as possible.”

St. Louis Metro Transit isn’t an outlier. As transit agencies seek to win back riders, a flurry of platforms — some backed by giants like Uber, Intel and BMW — are offering new technology partnerships. Whether it’s bundling bookings, payments or just trip planning, startups are selling these mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) offerings as a lifeline to make transit agencies the backbone of urban mobility.

Third-party platforms have become more appealing to transit agencies as they scramble to keep buses, trains and rail full of customers. According to the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), ridership and total miles traveled has declined since 2014, including a 2.5% drop from 2017 to 2018. The COVID-19 pandemic could accelerate this trend as more people continue working from home or shy away from crowding into buses and trains.

“This is like Expedia, the idea of seeing multiple airlines in one place to comparison shop,” said Regina Clewlow, CEO of transportation management firm Populus. “A lot of operators are looking at the question of whether that would give them more rides.”

But that the private growth could come at a cost, potentially injecting private concerns into what should be a public good, Metro Transit’s Mefford-Miller cautioned.

“If we let the market handle this planning on its own, a company might only do it for someone with a digital device or a bank account or only help people who don’t need special accommodation,” Mefford-Miller said. “That’s why we have as an underpinning an equitable and accessible system. It’s the underpinning before we choose any tools we use.”

The players

Amid the swarm of new startups there are a few giants. One of the biggest established players is Cubic Corp., a San Diego-based defense and public transportation company. The firm already controls payments and back-end software for hundreds of transit agencies, including in Chicago, New York and San Francisco, and in January launched a suite of new products under the brand name Umo to expand their offerings.

The package includes a customer-facing multimodal app, a fare collection platform, a contactless payment system, a rewards program, a behind-the-scenes management platform and a MaaS marketplace for public and private offerings. Mick Spiers, general manager of Umo, said the goal is to offer a “connected, integrated journey.”

“We’re uniquely placed as an independent, trusted third party that can be the data broker for a journey focused around the needs of the user,” Spiers added. “The journey we create has no commercial interest for us.”

The explosion in productivity software amid a broader remote work boom has been one of the pandemic’s clearest tech impacts. But learning to use a dozen new programs while having to decipher which data is hosted where can sometimes seem to have an adverse effect on worker productivity. It’s all time that users can take for granted, even when carrying out common tasks like navigating to the calendar to view more info to click a link to open the browser to redirect to the native app to open a Zoom call.

Slapdash is aiming to carve a new niche out for itself among workplace software tools, pushing a desire for peak performance to the forefront with a product that shaves seconds off each instance where a user needs to find data hosted in a cloud app or carry out an action. While most of the integration-heavy software suites to emerge during the remote work boom have focused on promoting visibility or re-skinning workflows across the tangled weave of SaaS apps, Slapdash founder Ivan Kanevski hopes that the company’s efforts to engineer a quicker path to information will push tech workers to integrate another tool into their workflow.

The team tells TechCrunch that they’ve raised $3.7 million in seed funding from investors that include S28 Capital, Quiet Capital, Quarry Ventures, UP2398 and Twenty Two Ventures. Angels participating in the round include co-founders at companies like Patreon, Docker and Zynga.

Kanevski says the team sought to emulate the success of popular apps like Superhuman, which have pushed low-latency command line interface navigation while emulating some of the sleek internal tools used at companies like Facebook, where he spent nearly six years as a software engineer.

Slapdash’s command line widget can be pulled up anywhere, once installed, with a quick keyboard shortcut. From there, users can search through a laundry list of indexable apps including Slack, Zoom, Jira and about 20 others. Beyond command line access, users can create folders of files and actions inside the full desktop app or create their own keyboard shortcuts to quickly hammer out a task. The app is available on Mac, Windows, Linux and the web.

“We’re not trying to displace the applications that you connect to Slapdash,” he says. “You won’t see us, for example, building document editing, you won’t see us building project management, just because our sort of philosophy is that we’re a neutral platform.”

The company offers a free tier for users indexing up to five apps and creating 10 commands and spaces; any more than that and you level up into a $12 per month paid plan. Things look more customized for enterprise-wide pricing. As the team hopes to make the tool essential to startups, Kanevski sees the app’s hefty utility for individual users as a clear asset in scaling up.

“If you anticipate rolling this out to larger organizations, you would want the people that are using the software to have a blast with it,” he says. “We have quite a lot of confidence that even at this sort of individual atomic level, we built something pretty joyful and helpful.”