Category: Tech news

Ispace, a Japanese space startup that aims to lead the development of a lunar economy, has unveiled its design for a large lander that could go to the moon as early as 2024.

Tokyo-based ispace said this next-gen lander, dubbed Series 2, would be used on the company’s third planned moon mission. The lander is both larger in size and payload capacity than the company’s first lander, coming in at around 9 feet tall and 14 feet wide including legs. The vehicle will be capable of carrying up to 500 kilograms to the moon’s surface and 2,000 kilograms to lunar orbit. Series 1, which will fly in 2022 and 2023, has a maximum payload capacity of only 30 kilograms.

Crucially, the new lander is designed to be able to survive the frigid lunar nighttime, possibly as long as a two-week stint on the moon’s surface. It’s also capable of landing on either the near or far side of the moon, including its polar regions.

The new lander has a few other features as well: It has multiple payload bays, and an advanced guidance, navigation and control (GNC) system to ensure the craft sticks the landing on the moon’s surface. The GNC technology is being provided by engineering developer Draper, a company with a deep footprint in the space industry. Draper is also one of 14 eligible contractors for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.

Ispace said in a statement that the lander has completed its preliminary design review; the next stage is manufacturing and assembly, which will be completed in partnership with General Atomics, a defense and aerospace technology company.

The partnership with Draper — a CLPS contractor — is key, as ispace wants its Series 2 to compete in the NASA program. “Over the next few months, we will work closely with Draper and General Atomics to prepare for the next NASA CLPS task order,” Kyle Acierno, CEO of ispace’s U.S.-based subsidiary, said.

Ispace is developing the next-gen lander out of its North American offices in Colorado, and it intends to also manufacture the vehicle in the United States. In the meanwhile, the company is still at work preparing for its first two lunar missions in 2022 and 2023. The company said the Series 1 lander is undergoing final assembly of the flight module at a facility in Germany owned by space launch company ArianeGroup. The customer manifest for the first mission is full, but ispace did say payload capacity is still available for the subsequent mission.

The lander unveiling comes just weeks after ispace announced the close of a $46 million Series C funding round, capital it said at the time would go toward the second and third planned missions.

We’re less than one month away from kicking off our flagship global event, TechCrunch Disrupt 2021. And we’re feeling the adrenaline rush that can only come when more than 10,000 startup icons, experts, founders, investors and makers gather to learn, inspire, connect, collaborate, compete and network.

Buy your pass here and brace yourself for three full days of Disrupt.

Let’s take a look at just some of the opportunities that can help you move the needle on your startup aspirations.

You’ll find plenty of startup action on two distinct stages. First up, the Disrupt main stage featuring in-depth interviews and panel discussions with a who’s-who of tech, policy and celebrity-slash-entrepreneurial talent — like Calendly CEO Tope Awotona, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and movie-star-turned-pot-businessman Seth Rogen.

The Extra Crunch stage is where you’ll find a deep bench of subject-matter experts sharing practical how-to content. You’ll take away actionable insights you can put into practice now — when you need it most. We’re talking essential topics like How to Raise Your First Dollars and The Subtle Challenges of Assessing Product-Market Fit.

Tip of the tech iceberg: Check out the full Disrupt 2021 agenda and don’t forget — your pass includes video-on-demand. You can relax knowing you won’t miss a single presentation.

Don’t miss the hundreds of innovative startups strutting their considerable stuff in Startup Alley, the virtual expo area. Dive into an ocean of opportunity — ask for a product demo, schedule a 1:1 video meeting or explore potential ways to collaborate.

Networking is a huge part of Disrupt, and you’ll find multiple ways to make valuable connections. Whether they happen spontaneously in our virtual event platform (the chat is where it’s at!) or curated meetups through CrunchMatch, our AI-powered platform, you’ll meet smart, exciting people eager to make a business connection. Who knows where a simple conversation can lead?

Don’t miss Startup Battlefield — the epic pitch competition that launched big-name companies like Dropbox, Mint, TripIt, Vurb and many more. Top early-stage startups from around the world — from any country and industry — will compete for a shot at $100,000 in equity-free prize money. You might just catch the next unicorn in its pony stage. It’s more than thrilling — as noted by Jessica McLean, director of Marketing and Communications, Infinite-Compute:

Watching the Startup Battlefield was fantastic. You could see the ingenuity and innovation happening in different technology spaces. Just looking at the sheer number of other pitch decks and hearing the judges tear them down and give feedback was very helpful.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 takes place September 21-23 — that’s less than a month away, folks! Buy your pass, plan your schedule and get ready to join your people and move your business forward.

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

Paxos, the company behind the Paxos Standard stablecoin (PAX), has announced that it is changing the name of its crypto asset. Paxos Standard is now Pax Dollar, and you’ll soon be able to identify it on your favorite cryptocurrency exchange, wallet or explorer under the USDP ticker.

Other than the name, USDP remains fundamentally identical to PAX. Like other stablecoins, USDP has been invented so that its value doesn’t fluctuate over time when you compare it to fiat currencies. The value of USDP is indexed to USD. At any point in time, one USDP is worth one USD.

Stablecoins provide many advantages. Sending money is as easy as moving crypto assets from one wallet to another. You don’t have to enter intermediary bank information, worry about local regulation, etc. Many people around the world don’t have bank accounts — stablecoins and cryptocurrency wallets could potentially become an alternative to traditional bank accounts.

You can also use stablecoins to take advantage of DeFi projects (decentralized finance). For instance, you can contribute to lending pools and earn interest from your stablecoin holdings.

In addition to USDP, other popular stablecoins include USD Coin (USDC) and Tether (USDT). As you can see, a naming convention has emerged over time. And Paxos says that it is changing the name of its stablecoin for this reason in particular.

Whenever Paxos issues new tokens, it stores some USD and USD equivalent in a bank account. Right now, Paxos uses US Treasury Bills with short maturities as USD equivalent. Auditing firms regularly check the company’s claims.

Paxos tries to position itself as a company that is deeply committed to regulation. It has recently written a report highlighting the differences between USDP, USDC and USDT. According to the company, USDC and USDT shouldn’t be considered as regulated assets because of their reserves. Paxos wants to emerge as the most legitimate player in the space so that big corporate clients choose Paxos as their preferred partner.

A couple of days ago, Circle announced that USDC would switch to cash and cash equivalent for USDC reserves. I’m sure we’ll hear more from cryptocurrency companies and their stablecoin reserve strategies in the future.

“In order to become a better writer, read your written words out loud.”

That’s one of the first, and best, writing tips I ever received. I always found the advice ironic because it required me to change the medium of my writing to become a better writer. Still, all these years later, it’s true: Vocalizing your words helps identify typos and incomplete thoughts, but also notice more subtle things like awkward turns of phrases or a weird rhythm in your sentence structure. Best of all, if you find yourself bored of your own text while reading out loud, you know readers will be, too.

This is all to say that writing, even for those who love writing, is a deeply human art built on top of non-obvious rules. While those complications don’t exactly scream for a tech solution, NoRedInk, a San Francisco-based startup, has spent nearly a decade trying to help students get better at their writing through software.

NoRedInk announced today that its digital writing curriculum, which pairs adaptive learning with Mad Libs-style prompts, has helped it raise a $50 million Series B led by Susquehanna Growth Equity, with participation from True Ventures. Other investors in the company include GSV, Rethink Education and Kapor Capital.

The financing event comes nearly six years after its Series A, a signal that the company has ambition to scale meaningfully in the coming months and years. With millions more, though, NoRedInk has to address its biggest challenge: the intricacies of the subject matter that it wants to make simple.

Founder and CEO Jeff Scheur built NoRedInk in 2012 when he was an English teacher in Chicago. The site served as a way to help kids get more than “red ink” on their papers, a nod at how teachers often use red ink to mark corrections and suggestions on assignments.

“Kids get feedback on their paper and they have no idea what to do with it,” Scheur said. “They see the grade, but they tend to just throw it out … so I started building tools to figure out how to help [students] apply very difficult to learn skills that we expect kids to know, but don’t explicitly teach them.”

Since launch, NoRedInk’s goal is to help students with writing skills ranging from how to structure an essay to how to cut fluff from their arguments to how to cite correctly.

“One of the great challenges about teaching writing is that we want to demystify the process of becoming a great writer without reducing the art form of expression,” he said. “So that means providing kids with lots of targeted personalized practice, and helping them realize that there’s no one way to write.”

It thus makes sense that NoRedInk uses adaptive learning, an educational method that uses an algorithm to get inputs of learners, such as strength areas or preferences, to create an output that better meets them where they are. After asking students for their favorite characters and role models, NoRedInk creates personalized writing exercises targeting each student’s interests, then guides them through the writing process with light support.

Scheur described part of the goal of NoRedInk as “breaking down difficult to learn skills with various degrees of scaffolding.”

To date, more than 10 billion exercises have been completed on NoRedInk’s practice engine — which is data the company uses to underscore problem areas, shared struggles and potential blind spots of traditional curriculum for its districts.

NoRedInk has a free-but-limited version of its platform for teachers to try, but offers a full-fledged premium version that integrates with learning management systems and other classrooms to offer a school and district a view of progress.

As the business expands, NoRedInk might need to get deeper into drafts in order to win over market share. Will it ever play the role of suggesting tone the way that AI-based grammar and writing unicorn Grammarly does? For now, it appears not.

“Grammarly is a great consumer app, it’s a modern-day version of Grammar spellcheck that Microsoft Word did all those years ago,” Scheur said. “NoRedInk is very different; it’s what schools and districts use to teach skills.”

Aileen Lee is one of the most prestigious and successful venture capitalists of the past decade. Before starting her own firm in Cowboy Ventures, Lee was a partner at KPCB for more than 12 years. Her portfolio includes DocSend, Ironclad, Philz Coffee, StyleSeat and many, many more.

So it should come as no surprise that we’re absolutely thrilled to have Lee join us alongside one of her portfolio company founders, Guild Education’s Rachel Carlson, on an upcoming episode of Extra Crunch Live. Click to register for free!

Extra Crunch Live brings founders and their investors together to pop the lid off of the black box that is fundraising. How did they meet? Why did they choose each other? What got them to yes? How do they work together now?

These are the pieces of the fundraising process that often aren’t covered in your average “how to fundraise” blog posts and programming, and we’re here to get these questions answered.

Extra Crunch Live also features the ECL Pitch-off, which gives folks in the audience the chance to raise their hand and pitch their startup to our guests, who will give their live feedback.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s get to know our guests.

Lee has been one of the most sought-after investors in Silicon Valley for as long as I’ve been in tech. A founding partner at All Raise, she is committed to diversity and inclusion and has an eye for talent, realizing that the former often precedes the latter.

She’s been on the Midas List a handful of times, and is also listed as one of Forbes’ most influential people.

Rachel Carlson founded Guild Education in 2015 and has led the company since. Guild has raised upwards of $370 million from investors that include General Catalyst, Felicis, Bessemer and more.

We’ll talk to these two about how to get to yes, what sings in a pitch deck and how they operate as partners to this day.

Extra Crunch Live is 100% free to folks who attend live, but only Extra Crunch members can access the content on-demand. If you’re not yet an Extra Crunch member, sign up here.

This episode of Extra Crunch Live goes down August 25 at 12pm PT/3pm ET. See you there!

How the tech world’s unique brand of politics is shaping the fight over who governs California.

We’ve rounded up our favorite speakers—from the Echo Dot to a voice-enabled Yamaha soundbar—from Amazon and its partners.

This moderately priced TV looks great and has every app you will ever need.

The restaurant industry was hit hard by the pandemic, but some pros went online to share skills, recipes, and just stay connected. Here’s how you can too.

It would take a determined hacker to break into the vulnerable B. Braun products, but the impact could be devastating.

The paste sticks onto wet tissue firmly by repelling blood. Surgeons hope it can save time—and lives.

Whether players come to chat, organize activities, buy and sell items, or just to log out, hubs have a language all their own.

Perhaps, if we put bots together the right way, consciousness will simply emerge.

Last week, Texas health care policymakers discussed taking vaccination status into account for Covid triage. It’s a larger conversation ethicists are bracing for.

How does one of the slowest animals on Earth manage to chase down a bird? Have a look for yourself.