Category: Tech news

GM and its new EV business unit BrightDrop are launching a fleet charging service as the automaker aims to ramp up its bet on connected and electric commercial vehicles.

The service, branded Ultium Charge 360 fleet charging service in a nod to GM’s new electric architecture and batteries that will be the foundation of its future EV plans, offers many of the tools that a commercial delivery, sales or motor pool business might need. It also includes an effort to add home charging for drivers.

The charging service is the latest addition to BrightDrop, which was launched in January. The business unit offers commercial customers — starting with FedEx — an ecosystem of electric and connected products. BrightDrop has said it will begin with two main products: an electric van called the EV600 with an estimated range of 250 miles and a pod-like electric pallet dubbed EP1. BrightDrop is part of GM’s aim to reach 1 million EV sales globally by 2025.

GM and BrightDrop are launching the charging service with Duke Energy company eTransEnergy, EVgo, In-Charge Energy and Schneider Electric, four companies that can provide the infrastructure needed to keep the commercial vans properly powered.

On the home-charging front, GM said it will expand an existing agreement with Qmerit.

The service is meant to provide tools for fleet operators, which Alex Keros, GM’s lead architect of EV Infrastructure, noted in a call with reporters Thursday are an important market growth segment and a critical piece of the electrification puzzle. The company looked at “how to put the right customer experiences together … you know, when you think about fleets these are cars that come home with employees for example, and we’ll have to help those companies and employees figure out charging in their home.”

News broke this morning that Revolut, a U.K.-based consumer fintech player, raised a Series E round of funding worth $800 million at a valuation of $33 billion. Those figures are breathtaking not only due to their sheer scale, but also thanks to their radical divergence from Revolut’s preceding funding event.

At times, The Exchange, TechCrunch’s markets-and-startups column, runs into two topics worth exploring in a single day. Today is such a day. You can check out our earlier notes on the buy now, pay later startup market and Apple’s entrance into the BNPL space here. Now, let’s talk about neobanks.

As TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden wrote earlier today concerning the news:

This latest Series E is being co-led by Softbank Vision Fund 2 and Tiger Global, who appear to be the only backers in this round. It comes on the heels of rumors earlier this month Revolut was raising big. Revolut last raised about a year ago, when it closed out a Series D at $580 million, but what is stunning is how much its valuation has changed since then, growing 6x (it was $5.5 billion last year).

Stunning indeed.

Lunden also went on to report on the company’s changing financial picture based on Revolut’s recently released 2020 results. In this entry, we’re digging more deeply into those financial results and usage metrics detailed by the fintech megacorn.

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The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

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The picture that emerges is one of a company with a rapidly improving financial image, albeit with some blank spaces regarding recent customer growth.

Shortly after the first  Sight Tech Global event, in December last year, Apple and Microsoft announced remarkable new features for mobile phones. Anyone could point the phone camera at a scene and request a “scene description.” In a flash, a cloud-based, computer vision AI determined what was in the scene and a machine-voice read the information. Learning that “a room contains three chairs and a table” might not seem like a big advance for the sighted, but for blind or visually impaired people, the new feature was a notable milestone for accessibility technology: An affordable, portable and nearly universal device could now “see” on behalf of just about anyone.

Technologies like scene description will be on the agenda at the second annual Sight Tech Global event, December 1-2, 2021. The free, sponsor-supported, virtual and global event will convene many of the world’s top technologists, researchers, advocates and founders to discuss how rapid advances in technology, many centered on AI, are altering — both improving and complicating — accessibility for people with sight loss.

Register today — it’s free.

At the heart of Sight Tech Global is the hard question: How do highly advanced, AI-based technologies actually become compelling, affordable products that folks who are blind or visually impaired readily adopt? It took 40 years, for example, for the $50,000 “Kurzweil reading machine,” a boxy desktop device, to evolve into what blind people take for granted today, a free app available on any mobile phone that can “read” just about any text. As anyone working in the field will tell you, shaping technologies into truly useful, everyday, affordable tools for people with vision loss is no less demanding than it was 40 years ago.

The agenda for last year’s Sight Tech Global convened many of the best minds across the spectrum of accessibility-related technologies, including Microsoft’s Saqib Shaikh, Amazon’s Josh Miele, Apple’s Chris Fleizach, Orcam’s Amnon Shashua, civil rights lawyer Haben Girma, author and professor Sara Hendren and researcher and professor Danna Gurari. In addition to those speakers were a dozen well attended breakout sessions led by Perkins Access, Salesforce, APH, Humanware and others.

Because the event was free, virtual and highly accessible, more than 4,000 people from 70 countries attended the event last December. All the sessions (video and transcript) are still available on demand via the agenda or on YouTube. Attendees gave the event a generous thumbs up: 4.7 out of 5  for programming and 4.6 out of 5 for accessibility.

Now is the time to register so that our all-volunteer team can keep you posted on agenda updates and ensure you have a chance to sign up for limited-attendance breakout sessions. You can register here.

Got programming ideas? We are happy to hear from you — especially founders, inventors and researchers who have working technology products! The programming committee includes Jim Fruchterman (Benetech / TechMatters), Larry Goldberg (Verizon Media), Matt King (Facebook), Professor Roberto Manduchi (UC Santa Cruz) and Will Butler (Be My Eyes). Contact us [email protected].

Calling all sponsors! We’re delighted that Google, TechCrunch and Verizon Media have already signed on for 2021, and nearly all last year’s sponsors have signaled that they plan to renew their support for this significant event. Private donors are also welcome! To learn more, read here or contact us a [email protected].

Sight Tech Global is a production of the Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired, a 501(c)(3), that has been serving the Silicon Valley area for 75 years. Vista’s executive director, Karae Lisle, is the event’s chair. Vista is the beneficiary of all sponsorships and donations to Sight Tech Global. In 2020, 92% of the proceeds from Sight Tech Global went to support the Vista Center’s work to help thousands of people with vision loss in the Bay Area lead their best life.

Please join us at Sight Tech Global in December!

 

At the TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising event last week, Norwest Venture Partners‘ Lisa Wu took the stage to discuss how founders can think like venture capitalists in all facets of their business. The overlapping in job roles is uncanny: The best investors and founders have to find focus through the noise, understand the weight of due diligence and pitch others with conviction. Wu, who has investments in Plaid, Calm and Ritual, used anecdotes and exercises — such as the eyebrow test — in the tactical, engaging chat.

Pitch deck or pitch blurb?

Startup founders often turn to pitch decks when fundraising as a visual representation of their story — from the origins to total addressable market to those juicy metrics. While the format definitely works, the influx of pitch decks in a hot deal environment makes it harder to stand out.

Wu gave some pointers on how she reacts to cold pitch decks, and why founders may want to take some unconventional advice.

I love it because I can quickly flip through the deck and generally form an opinion on it. And I think I’ve read some stat recently, which is that investors really spend 2 minutes and 47 seconds per deck. It’s an easy way for me to, in that short amount of time, just get a calibration of the business to decide whether to move forward.

But, as the founder, I’ll probably tell you don’t do [the cold pitch deck]. Because if you’re sending me the pitch deck, I’m quickly screening and then I’m making a decision of whether it makes sense to meet, but your goal is really just to try to get the meeting with me to tell the story and let that unfold. And so, give us enough of it — like a blurb to tease us to want to continue to engage is great. But if it is possible, I would suggest a late pullback of the pitch deck, even though I love to receive it in advance. (Timestamp: 21:50)

In other words, she loves founders sliding into the DMs with pitch decks, but doesn’t think that strategy always gives the founder storytelling power.

This answer triggered a series of questions from attendees on whether pitch decks are even necessary in the first place. Here, Wu explains how the competitive venture market has impacted her preferences — and her interest in what I’d describe it as a private beta, except for fundraising rounds.

So, everything is shifting these days. Because there’s so much capital [and competition] out there, sometimes if I’m chasing a really hot company, I actually prefer that they don’t have a deck, or they haven’t created one yet. Because once you have a deck, that means you can go and take it out to a bunch of other investors, too. And so it’s helpful to structure the conversation and to storytell around it. I think I like a deck more so than not, unless it’s in a competitive situation. If I’m trying to close the deal, I actually prefer just an open dialogue. (Timestamp: 23:30)

We just have them come in and we just prepare our team internally to let them know that there’s no deck here. And so, it’s just up to the founders to really just tell the story to us. And, it’s worked. (Timestamp: 24:20)

• Don’t send VC a cold deck ever again: Start sending video pitches
• 11 words and phrases to cut from your VC pitch deck
• How Retail Zipline’s Series A pitch deck ticked every box for Emergence Capital

Help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups.

Provide a recommendation in this quick survey and we’ll share the results with everybody.

 

How to implement conflicting feedback?

The need for more affordable housing has never been more urgent as a shortage in the U.S. housing market persists.

Startups attempting to help address the shortage in a variety of ways abound. One such startup, Abodu, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners. Previous backer Initialized Capital also participated in the financing, along with Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, former Stockton, California Mayor Michael Tubbs, GGV investor Hans Tung and Paradox Capital’s Kyle Tibbitts.

The California legislature changed laws in 2017 to make it easier to build Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs). Then on January 1, 2020, the state of California made it dramatically easier to add extra housing units to single-family home sites. Cities and local agencies have to quickly approve or deny ADU projects within 60 days of receiving a permit application. The state also now prevents cities from imposing minimum lot size requirements, maximum ADU dimensions or off-street parking requirements. 

Redwood City, California-based Abodu, which builds prefabricated ADUs, was founded in 2018 to serve as a “one-stop shop” for building an ADU, or as some describe it, a home in a backyard.

What sets the company apart from others in the space, its execs claim, is that it not only builds and installs the units, it helps homeowners with the painful process of getting permits. Abodu says it pre-approves its structural engineering with California state-level agencies to ensure its units can be built statewide and works with local agencies to pre-approve its foundation systems to ensure projects can proceed on predictable timelines.

It also claims to offer a cheaper and faster process than if one were to build an ADU from start to finish. Specifically, the startup claims that one of its backyard homes can be installed in just 10% of the time it would take for a traditional ADU to be built. 

Abodu has been active in the market, selling and building its ADUs since the fall of 2019. Since then, it has put “dozens and dozens” of units in the ground, and has multiple dozen units in production on top of that, according to CEO and co-founder John Geary. So far, it’s operating in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Seattle. The company claims it can deliver an ADU in as little as 30 days in San Jose and Los Angeles thanks to the cities’ pre-approval process. In other cities in California and Washington, turnaround is “as little as 12 weeks.” But a standard bespoke project takes 4-5 months from start to finish, according to Geary.

The startup’s three products include a 340-square foot studio; a 500-square foot one bedroom, one bath, and a 610-square foot two bedroom unit. All have kitchens and living space.

Pricing starts at $190,000, but the average project cost across all sizes is around $230,000, Geary said, inclusive of permits and site work.

There are a variety of use cases for ADUs, the most popular of which is to house family and for rental income. 

“During the pandemic, multigenerational living has been at an all-time high. There are acute family needs that people are trying to solve for,” Geary said. “In addition, folks are earning extra money by renting them out to members of the community such as teachers or fireman, a single person or younger couple.”

Next, Abodu is eyeing the San Diego market.

Earlier this week, we covered the recent raise of Mighty Buildings, another Bay Area-based startup building ADUs and other housing. The biggest difference between the two companies, according to Geary, is that Mighty Buildings is focused on innovation in construction with its 3D-printed method. 

“We decided early on that we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel from the construction standpoint,” Geary said. “Instead, we looked at ‘how can we solve for speed and ease?’ ”

Abodu operates with an asset-light model, and doesn’t own any factories. Instead, it has built a network of factory “partners” across the Western U.S. that builds its units depending on how their capacities look at any given time.

Naturally, the company’s investors are bullish on the company’s business model.

Jeff Crowe, managing partner of Norwest Venture Partners, believes that Abodu’s “beautifully crafted units” are just one of the company’s selling points.

“John, Eric, and their team manage the end-to-end process of permitting, building, and installing on behalf of their customers,” he told TechCrunch. “And with the expedited permitting that Abodu has been granted in over two dozen cities, it has faster time-to-installation than other ADU market participants.  The result has been very high levels of customer satisfaction and rapid growth.”

Former Stockton Mayor Tubbs said Abodu is tackling two of California’s most consequential issues: the statewide housing shortage and its impacts on racial and economic segregation in our neighborhoods.

“By making it fast and accessible for normal homeowners to build high-quality backyard housing units, Abodu’s success will mean integrating options for both renters and homeowners in the same neighborhoods, while supporting small landlords and property owners in building equity in their homes,” he wrote via email.

 

Alt-Bionics made waves back in late 2019 when the brand new startup competed at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Tech Symposium. The company finished second to 3BM’s infrared paint-curing system, but Alt went on to capture national and international headlines on the strength of promising technology and a great story.

A writeup on the school’s site noted that, at $700, its prosthetic hand cost a mere fraction of the cost of standard systems. Most of the subsequent coverage has focused on the story of the team’s journey from good idea to marketable product, with CEO/co-founder (and USTA engineering grad) Ryan Saavedra noting that these sorts of products can range from $10,000-$150,000 a pop. The company is working to a price point around $3,500.

In the meantime, the Alt-Bionics team has been chronicling product development on social media. Before we get this roundup stared in earnest, we wanted to check in with Saavedra about how the past three years have gone and what the future holds for the company. And bonus: We’ve got a couple of unreleased renderings that Alt notes are “not indicative of our final product. Just merely a celebratory rendering our team put together to announce the completion of our patent” — so take that as you will.

TechCrunch: Why are prosthetics prohibitively expensive?

I’ll start by saying that they aren’t expensive to manufacture and they do not need to be so expensive to the user. At all. There is no one answer for this, but I will do my best to summarize the multiple reasons behind the exorbitant prices surrounding bionic hands. We have found that there are two parts to the end price/cost of prosthetic devices. A third (but secondary reason) will also be discussed.

The manufacturer. The manufacturer develops and creates these bionic devices and then sells them to prosthetic and orthotic clinics (one of the few places you can be fitted for and purchase these devices). The most affordable bionic prosthetic hand sold to P&O clinics starts at about $10,000 and can go up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Oddly enough, this cost doesn’t always reflect the functionality or performance of the devices. These manufacturers ultimately determine the prices of their devices. The larger among them cite overhead costs as the primary reason they cannot lower their price tags.

The prosthetic & orthotic clinic. We are still learning more about the specifics, but these clinics handle the medical insurance side of things. This means that they submit LCodes (insurance codes for bionic hands, suggested by the manufacturer) to the medical insurance company for reimbursement. These LCodes have floor and ceiling reimbursement amounts that the prosthetist can select. The reimbursement amount is commonly more than what they paid for the hand, and covers the time and effort the clinic and clinician put into procurement, fitting, testing, assembly and patient care. While normally a reasonable margin is obtained (through reimbursement amounts closer to the floor), we have seen reimbursement amounts exceed $124,000 for a $10,000 hand (from a 2018 patient receipt).

Technological stagnation. The technology for bionic hands has been stagnant for almost 15 years, with companies only just now emerging as competitors in this space. Larger companies in this space are tackling more than the one area of transradial (below elbow) bionic prosthetic devices. This means that their attention is not solely focused on the development and affordability aspects of upper extremity prostheses. The stagnation has meant that there are no external factors or forces being pressed on the existing devices and their manufacturers. Essentially, they have no reason to lower the prices, so they remain the same. This is more of an affirmation that reason No. 1 is a larger problem.

TechCrunch: How has the reception been from the broader medical community?

Wonderful! Clinics, clinicians, patients, potential users and other competing companies have all been incredibly supportive of our mission. The space and companies, while competitive, are all aiming for the same thing: using technological advancements to give people a better quality of life.

There is obviously some skepticism at first at how we are able to achieve our much lower price point ($3,500), but it is quickly assuaged when we talk with them about our technologies and processes. We are currently discussing partnerships with prosthetic and orthotic clinics to help develop devices that not only help patients, but also lessen the burden of prosthetists in the repair and maintenance of these devices.

TechCrunch: How far along is the project? What’s the current timeline for bringing it to market?

The project is just emerging from its infancy and is about 42% complete. Some notable achievements are as follows:

• Successful proof of concept with Army Ranger, Ryan Davis. December, 2019.
• Alt-Bionics was formed. May 2020.
• $42,000 SolidWorks grant from D’Assault Systems. July, 2020.
• Provisional patent filed. June, 2021.
• $50,000 investment from the city of San Antonio’s SAMMI Fund. July 2021.

The current timeline to bring our device to market is one year from the closing of our seed round of financing. We have, to date, raised $142,000 of our $200,000 goal and are looking to close out this round by September.

TechCrunch: What have the biggest challenges been so far?

Navigating the FDA regulatory space and raising capital. It is no secret that the FDA regulatory process is a fearsome beast. There are even companies dedicated to assisting those looking to bring medical devices to market, navigate the process and all its intricacies. Alt-Bionics was recently accepted into a biomedical accelerator program based out of San Antonio, Texas, and will be working with regulatory experts to ensure we have a smooth rest of the ride to market. While our mission is noble and our business plan sound, COVID has brought about many worries and fears from investors. The inability to pitch to a live audience has hindered us from being able to appear in front of investors and has made raising capital a little more difficult than it normally is for a company like ours.

TechCrunch: What is your funding status? How much have you raised thus far and are you looking to raise more?

To date, Alt-Bionics has raised a total of $142,000 from a handful of investors and has received a $50,000 investment from the city of San Antonio’s SAMMI fund. We are looking for an additional $58,000 from accredited investors to help fill out our seed round. From there our timeline of one year to market begins (though we have a hefty head start) and Alt-Bionics will push into its Series A, which will allow us to bring on additional engineers, develop the technology further and expand into international markets.

TechCrunch: Are developing markets going to be a key target? 

Developing countries will be a key market for Alt-Bionics, particularly through NGOs, and will play an important part in our international expansion. We see a large opportunity to provide our medical devices to these markets. Affordability is critical to our mission to provide access to these devices and therefore we believe we will be successful with this expansion.

And now back to your regularly scheduled roundup.

I’ll cop to the fact that when Berkshire Grey announced a “$23+” million deal for grocery picking robots, I had one name in mind: Walmart. After talking a bit about Walmart’s mixed robotics play in this panel a couple of weeks back, I’d heard rumblings the company was getting set for a big new play in the category.

Granted, the Symbotic deal doesn’t necessarily mean BG isn’t teaming with Walmart on this one, but it’s worth noting that the mega-retailer loves talking about its big spending on automation. From the outside, looking in, at least, it seems like these deals are often as much about the PR of looking like it’s ready to compete with Amazon as they are about actually competing with Amazon (win-win, I guess).

The deal will bring Symbotic’s tech to 25 additional Walmart distribution centers (the two have been running pilots since 2017) in a rollout that will take “several years,” per Walmart. I’ve speculated before (and will happily continue to do so) that one or several of these robotic fulfillment companies are a no-brainer acquisition for Walmart, though Symbotic is probably a bit tougher, given existing ties with competitors like Target.

Berkshire Grey, meanwhile, continues to go the public route. Revolution Acceleration Acquisition Corp. (RAAC) shareholders are set to vote on the SPAC deal on July 20. Newly soon to be acquired Fetch, meanwhile, announced a deal with supply chain logistics company Korber for a new pallet robot designed to replace forklifts.

A pair of cool research projects this week. Devin wrote about a team from Facebook AI, UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University that is exploring Rapid Motor Adaptation, a method that allows quadrupedal robots to adapt to uneven terrain on the fly. This quote from one of the Berkley researchers gets to the heart of the matter: “We do not learn about sand, we learn about feet sinking.”

Meanwhile, I wrote about research at MIT’s CSAIL that involves using robotic arms to get people dressed. It’s a promising bit of functionality for eldercare robotics and technology that could assist people with mobility issues.

Every application is a palimpsest of technologies, each layer forming a base that enables the next layer to function. Web front ends rely on JavaScript and browser DOM, which rely on back-end APIs, which themselves rely on databases.

As one goes deeper down the stack, engineering decisions become ever more conservative — changing the location of a button in a web app is an inconvenience; changing a database engine can radically upend an entire project.

It’s little surprise then that database technologies are among the longest-lasting engineering projects in the modern software developer toolkit. MySQL, which remains one of the most popular database engines in the world, was first released in the mid-1990s, and Oracle Database, launched more than four decades ago, is still widely used in high-performance corporate environments.

Database technology can change the world, but the world in these parts changes very, very slowly. That’s made building a startup in the sector a tough equation: Sales cycles can be painfully slow, even when new features can dramatically expand a developer’s capabilities. Competition is stiff and comes from some of the largest and most entrenched tech companies in the world. Exits have also been few and far between.

That challenge — and opportunity — is what makes studying Cockroach Labs so interesting. The company behind CockroachDB attempts to solve a long-standing problem in large-scale, distributed database architecture: How to make it so that data created in one place on the planet is always available for consumption by applications that are thousands of miles away, immediately and accurately. Making global data always available immediately and accurately might sound like a simple use case, but in reality it’s quite the herculean task. Cockroach Labs’ story is one of an uphill struggle, but one that saw it turn into a next-generation, $2-billion-valued database contender.

The lead writer of this EC-1 is Bob Reselman. Reselman has been writing about the enterprise software market for more than two decades, with a particular emphasis on teaching and educating engineers on technology. The lead editor for this package was Danny Crichton, the assistant editor was Ram Iyer, the copy editor was Richard Dal Porto, figures were designed by Bob Reselman and stylized by Bryce Durbin, and illustrations were drawn by Nigel Sussman.

CockroachDB had no say in the content of this analysis and did not get advance access to it. Reselman has no financial ties to CockroachDB or other conflicts of interest to disclose.

The CockroachDB EC-1 comprises four main articles numbering 9,100 words and a reading time of 37 minutes. Here’s what we’ll be crawling over:

• Part 1: Origin story “CockroachDB, the database that just won’t die” (2,100 words/8 minutes) — Looks at the origins of CockroachDB, from the creation of the popular open-source image editor GIMP to some of Google’s most well-known infrastructure products.
• Part 2: Technical design “How engineers fought the CAP theorem in the global war on latency” (2,400 words/10 minutes) — Analyzes the key differentiation that CockroachDB offers the relational database market, particularly its focus on geography and data storage.
• Part 3: Developer relations and business “‘Developers, as you know, do not like to pay for things‘” (2,200 words/9 minutes) — Explores how CockroachDB engages with developers while also pivoting to the cloud at a key inflection point in its business.
• Part 4: Competitive landscape and future “Scaling CockroachDB in the red ocean of relational databases” (2,400 words/10 minutes) — Evaluates the future of the startup within the extremely competitive landscape of relational databases and what possible exit routes might look like.

We’re always iterating on the EC-1 format. If you have questions, comments or ideas, please send an email to TechCrunch Managing Editor Danny Crichton at [email protected].

There is an art to engineering, and sometimes engineering can transform art. For Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, those two worlds collided when they created the widely successful open-source graphics program, GIMP, as college students at Berkeley.

That project was so successful that when the two joined Google in 2002, Sergey Brin and Larry Page personally stopped by to tell the new hires how much they liked it and explained how they used the program to create the first Google logo.

In terms of good fortune in the corporate hierarchy, when you get this type of recognition in a company such as Google, there’s only one way you can go — up. They went from rising stars to stars at Google, becoming the go-to guys on the Infrastructure Team. They could easily have looked forward to a lifetime of lucrative employment.

But Kimball, Mattis and another Google employee, Ben Darnell, wanted more — a company of their own. To realize their ambitions, they created Cockroach Labs, the business entity behind their ambitious open-source database CockroachDB. Can some of the smartest former engineers in Google’s arsenal upend the world of databases in a market spotted with the gravesites of storage dreams past? That’s what we are here to find out.

Berkeley software distribution

Mattis and Kimball were roommates at Berkeley majoring in computer science in the early-to-mid-1990s. In addition to their usual studies, they also became involved with the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF), an organization of undergraduates who have a keen, almost obsessive interest in CS.

Now is the time to create your own content. These tools can help you get great audio and video quality from the start.

From #UKnowUrBlackWhen to #BlackLivesMatter, how a loose online network became a pop culture juggernaut, an engine of social justice, and a lens into the future.

Southeast Asia’s car marketplace wars are going into high drive. Today Carsome Group, one of the region’s largest online used car marketplaces, said it plans to acquire listings platform iCar Asia in a transaction worth more than $200 million.

Carsome has agreed to acquire 19.9% of iCar Asia from Malaysia internet conglomerate Catcha Group. In exchange, Catcha Group will become a shareholder in Carsome Group. Carsome and Catcha Group have also made a joint proposal to iCar Asia’s directors to buy the rest of the company from its shareholders.

Carsome rival Carro revealed one month ago that it raised a $360 million Series C led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, boosting it to unicorn status. A day after Carro’s announcement, DealStreetAsia reported that Carsome is in talks to raise over $200 million in a pre-IPO round.

Carsome hasn’t confirmed the funding, but it has been making moves to expand its reach, including a strategic investment in PT Universal, an offline car and motorcycle auction company that has retail branches in five Indonesian cities. Carsome said its investment in PT Universal will allow it to double its automotive transaction volumes in Indonesia.

Now Carsome says its integration with iCar Asia will create a marketplace that is targeting $1 billion in revenue for this year, with about 100,000 cars transacted annually, more than 460,000 live partner listings and over 13,000 car dealers it its network.

iCar Asia, which is listed on the Australian stock exchange, announced last year that it had received a takeover offer from China-based online auto marketplace Autohome. Catcha Group founder Patrick Grove told the Australian Financial Review that proposal was “one of the casualties of the cold war” between China and Australia.

In a press statement, Carsome co-founder and group chief executive officer Eric Cheng said the deal “is the first step toward consolidation to form the largest digital automotive group in terms of revenue, user base, largest live listing and the best end-to-end fulfilment capacity in the region.”

If you follow startup news from Indonesia, you know that the country’s estimated 60 million small businesses are a hot target for tech companies. BukuKas and BukuWarung, for example, both recently raised large rounds to fuel their race to digitize SMEs’ operations. Founded in November 2020, Vara is focused specifically on making staff management easier for small businesses and their workers, replacing the notebooks or spreadsheets many relied on to keep track of payroll with an app called Bukugaji.

The company announced today it has raised $4.8 million in seed funding from Go Ventures, RTP Global, AlphaJWC, Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, FEBE Ventures and Taurus Ventures. Founded by Vidush Mahansaria and Abhinav Karale, who met while studying at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Vara is part of the Surge accelerator program’s fifth cohort of startups. It says more than 100,000 small businesses are already using Bukugaji.

The app has features to track attendance, calculate salaries and worker loans and disburse payroll. Mahansaria told TechCrunch that Bukugaji is aimed at companies that have less than 30 employees. Many of them are in retail, food and beverage or labor-heavy service sectors like construction and transportation. Bukugaji has features for specific employee segments, like operational staff who usually work in shifts, or permanent staff whose paychecks are fixed over a specific time period.

“Before downloading and onboarding on Bukugaji, the vast majority of our users utilized notebooks to mark attendance and track payroll,” Mahansaria said. “A small portion used the notes features on their phones or simple Excel sheets.” Bukugaji is designed to be fully self-service, so businesses can download and start using the app on their own. Its main app is mobile only, but the platform also has a web version.

The businesses Bukugaji serves often have workers who are unbanked, meaning they don’t have access to a bank account or traditional financial services. Vara’s founders say many of them live paycheck to paycheck and this means they sometimes have to take out loans from their employers.

“Employees often request cash advances from their employers toward the end of the month, when they need the money the most because sometimes they can’t make ends meet,” said Mahansaria. “This has two outcomes: first, it ties up working capital for the employer. Second, it makes the employee increasingly reliant on the employer to meet emergency needs. It’s hard to break out of this cycle given the current limited accessibility to formal financial infrastructure for this market segment.”

Earned wage access (EWA) platforms are focused on solving this problem by giving employees on-demand access to wages, instead of having to wait for their paycheck. EWA companies are gaining traction around the world, including Wagely and GajiGesa in Indonesia. Vara doesn’t have immediate plans to add an EWA feature to Bukugaji, but it is something the company is thinking about as part of the value-additive services it will build into the platform.

“Owning end-to-end payroll and attendance gives us an information edge that is unparalleled for this labor segment,” Mahansaria said, noting that the data can enable companies to add things like benefits that their employees usually don’t have access to, and in turn give workers a digitally-verified work history.

In the near future, Bukugaji will add time-saving features like automated allowances and overtime, dashboard shortcuts, reminders and customizable reports. It also plans to allow employers to disburse salaries directly through the platform. Over the longer term, Bukugaji will offer data analytics to companies and their workers. For example, employees will also be able to see how their earnings have changed over time. Employers, meanwhile can spot trends in attendance and salary.

Though Vara may eventually expand into markets, Mahansaria said it is currently “razor-focused on Indonesia,” where SMEs account for about 60% of the country’s gross domestic product and employ the vast majority of its workforce.

Nasir Qadree entered the world of venture capital six years ago, beginning with a role at Village Capital in Washington, then as an associate director of social investments at AT&T.

Qadree encountered even more opportunities to join established venture firms recently. In fact, he says that after deciding early last year to embark on launching his own firm — and garnering capital commitments for it — he became quite interesting to investors who tried bringing him aboard their own organizations.

He gets it, he says. “I think it’s great that organizations want to find new lines of business through their connections with fund managers who have differentiated sourcing and who will yield, I’d imagine, a more diversified portfolio.”

Still, he wasn’t going to hitch his wagon to another firm once he got going. “Venture capital is a wealth-creating business,” says Qadree. “I’m a first-generation college student. I grew up in the projects [and became] president” of numerous student-led organizations at his alma mater, Hampton University.

“I think it’s up to someone like myself and people who are constantly being asked these questions to have strong conviction around how to think about building your franchise. I’ve been through so much to get to this point that to give up my equity, give up my branding and ideas” was not going to happen, he says.

Qadree’s bet on himself appears to be paying off. His Washington-based venture firm, Zeal Capital Partners, today announced that it has closed its oversubscribed subscribed first fund with $62.1 million, making it one of the largest funds to be raised by a solo general partner to date. It was initially targeting $25 million.

That Qadree’s pitch resonated so widely isn’t surprising. Zeal is focused primarily on two sectors that are being reshaped fast: financial tech and the future of work. The themes play neatly into the firm’s overarching thesis around inclusive investing, meaning in this case that the startups which interest Zeal need in some way to address the yawning economic inequality in the U.S.

The firm’s current portfolio — it has announced five investments publicly — offers a flavor of what’s to come. For example, Kanarys, a three-year-old SaaS platform that provides metrics to help companies prioritize and optimize diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the workplace. Zeal led its $3 million seed round, led by Revolution’s Rise of the Rest seed fund and others.

Meanwhile, three-year-old Esusu automates credit building by reporting its customers’ monthly rent payments to credit bureaus in an effort to boost their credit score. The app also allows users to pool and withdraw money for big-ticket transactions, then reports the fulfillment of those obligations to credit bureaus to improve their credit profiles. Forbes wrote about the company — which has raised $4 million in seed funding — last August.

Kanary and Esusu’s founders are Black, as is Qadree. But Qadree isn’t exclusively funding Black founders or Latino founders or women-led teams (though women founders currently represent 40% of the portfolio). While he says he is leaning into empowering founders who have been underrepresented in the tech world for decades, “being Black doesn’t mean we will only fund Black and brown entrepreneurs.”

He says he is far more focused on ensuring that a team has a specific strategy to evolve (quickly) into a more diverse group if it doesn’t start that way. Says Qadree, “If you’re building out a fintech company that’s rethinking FICO scores and you’re an all-white team, you have to show us that diversifying your management team is top of mind, that you recognize your blind spot.”

Zeal is also focused on founders who are outside of major tech hubs like the Bay Area, New York, and Boston. These “secondary markets” as Qadree calls them (using air quotes during a Zoom call), are just as important to Zeal’s mission around inclusive investing. “We want to level the playing field geographically so that an entrepreneur in Nashville or Detroit receives their fair share of investment capital, just as the Harvard grad who lives in Silicon Valley and is an alum of Google.”

Zeal’s new fund is anchored by investors Truist and Paypal, with additional investments from Synchrony Financial, the Skoll Foundation, Foot Locker, DC’s RockCreek, Hampton University Endowment, Southern New Hampshire University, and Gary Community Investment.

It also counts as investors numerous individuals who are also advising the firm, including NEA cofounder Frank Bonsal and Wes Moore, the former CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation (and current gubernatorial candidate in Maryland).

Not last, Qadree has brought into the fold several operating partners, including Rachel Williams, who is the head of equity, inclusion and diversity at X, the “moonshot factory” that is part of Alphabet; and Kam Syed, a senior sales and business development exec at Amazon.

Pictured above, left to right: Andy Will, a senior associate with Zeal; Nicole ward, an analyst with the firm; Nasir Qadree; Nicole West, an executive in residence who was formerly a managing director with Legg Mason; and Jason Green, who cofounded SkillSmart and is also now an executive in residence with Zeal.

The skies are on the cusp of getting busier — and louder — as drone delivery and electric vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft startups move from moonshot to commercialization. One former NASA engineer and ex-director of Uber’s air taxi division is developing tech to ensure that more air traffic doesn’t equal more noise.

Mark Moore, who was most recently director of engineering at Uber Elevate until its acquisition by Joby Aviation, has a launched his own company called Whisper Aero. The startup, which came out of stealth this week, is aiming to designing an electric thruster it says will blend noise emitted from delivery drones and eVTOLs alike into background levels, making them nearly imperceptible to the human ear.

It’s a formidable challenge. Solving the noise problem comes down to more than simply cranking down the volume. Noise profiles are also characterized by other variables, like frequency. For example, helicopters have a main rotor and tail rotor that generate two separate frequencies, which makes them much more irritating to the human ear than if they were at a single frequency, Moore told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

Complicating the picture even further is that eVTOL companies are designing entirely new types of aircraft, ones that may generate different acoustic profiles than other rotorcraft (like helicopters). The U.S. Army recently undertook a research study confirming that eVTOL rotors generate more of a type of noise referred to as broadband, rather than tonal noise which is generated by helicopters. And as each eVTOL company is developing its own design, not all of the electric aircraft will generate the same level or kind of noise.

Whisper is designing its scalable product to be adoptable across the board.

Moore said the idea for the company had been fomenting for years. He and Whisper COO Ian Villa, who headed strategy and simulation at Elevate, realized years ago that noise (that is, less of it) was key to air taxis taking off.

“The thing that was abundantly clear was, noise matters most,” Villa said. “It is the hardest barrier to break through. And not enough of these developers were spending the time, the resources, the mindshare to really unlock that.”

Helicopters have mostly been able to get away with their terrible noise profile because they are used so infrequently. But eVTOL companies like Joby Aviation are envisioning far higher ride volumes. Moore is quick to point out that companies like Joby (which purchased Elevate at the end of 2020) are already developing aircraft that are many times quieter than helicopter, and are “a step in the right direction.”

“The question is, ‘is it enough of a step to get to significant adoption?’ And that’s what we’re focused on.”

Whisper is staying mum on the details of its thruster design. It has managed to attract around $7.5 million investment from firms like Lux Capital, Abstract Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Kindred Ventures and Robert Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition Ventures. It’s also aiming to convert its provisional patents with the United States Patent and Trademark Office sometime next year.

From there, the startup envisions launching in the small drone market around 2023, before scaling progressively up to air taxis. Moore said the goal is to get the thrusters manufactured and in vehicles by the end of the decade. Should the first generation of eVTOL go to market in 2024 (as Archer Aviation and Joby have proposed), Whisper’s product could potentially appear in second generation eVTOL.

In the meantime, Whisper will continue testing and working out remaining technical challenges – least among which is how to manufacture the end product at a reasonable cost. Whisper is also preparing to conduct dynamic testing in a wind tunnel, in addition to the static tests it has undertaken at its Tennessee headquarters, some in partnership with the U.S. Air Force.

“It’s got to be quiet enough to blend into the background noise,” Moore said. “We know this and that’s the technology we’re developing.”

Carbon tracking is very much the new hot thing in tech, and we’ve previously covered more generalist startups doing this at scale for companies, such as Plan A Earth out of Berlin.

But there’s clearly an opportunity to get deep into a vertical sector and tailor solutions to it.

That’s the plan of Vaayu, a carbon tracking platform aimed specifically at retailers. It has now raised $1.57 million in pre-seed funding in a round led by CapitalT. Several angels also took part, including Atomico’s Angel Program, Planet Positive LP, Saarbrücker 21, Expedite Ventures and NP-Hard Ventures.

Carbon tracking for the retail fashion industry, in particular, is urgently needed. Unfortunately, the fashion industry remains responsible for 10% of annual global carbon emissions, which ads up to more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined.

Vaayu says it integrates with various point-of-sale systems, such as Shopify and Webflow. It then pulls in data on logistics, operations and packaging to monitor, measure and reduce their carbon emissions. Normally, retailers calculate emissions once a year, which is obviously far less accurate.

Vaayu was founded in 2020 by Namrata Sandhu (CEO), former head of Sustainability at fashion retailer Zalando, as well as Anita Daminov (CPO) and Luca Schmid (CTO). Vaayu currently has 25 global brand customers, including Missoma, Armed Angels and Organic Basics.

Commenting on the fundraise, Sandhu said: “We have only nine short years left to achieve the UN’s goal of reducing carbon emissions by 50% by 2030 and as the third-largest contributor to global emissions, retailers need to take action — and fast. Vaayu is here to help retailers measure, monitor, and reduce their carbon footprint at scale across the entire supply chain — something that I know from my own experience can be complex and expensive.”

Speaking to me over a call, Sandhu told me: “Putting the focus on retail basically allows us to automate the calculation, which means in three clicks you can get your carbon footprint right away. That then allows us to really get accurate data, and with that, we can basically do reductions specific to the business but using software, rather than any kind of manual intervention or a kind of ‘intermediate’ state where you need to put together an Excel sheet. Because we focus on retail we can automate the entire process and also automate the reductions.”

“We are delighted to be backed by female-led CapitalT who understood us and our vision right from the start. We look forward to developing Vaayu further in the coming months so we can reach as many retailers as possible and help put the brakes on the impending climate crisis,” she added.

Janneke Niessen, founding partner, CapitalT commented: “We are very excited to join Vaayu on their mission to reduce carbon emission for retailers worldwide. The Vaayu product is very scalable and its quick and easy implementation allows for fast adoption. We are confident that with this experienced team, Vaayu will soon be one of the fastest-growing climate tech companies in Europe and the world.”