Union Square Ventures and Learn Capital file paperwork indicating new funds

As 2020 comes to a long-awaited end, a series of filings indicate that venture capitalists are ending the year with fresh money. According to SEC paperwork, Learn Capital and USV have filed paperwork that shows the firms have raised new, multimillion-dollar funds.

If you’ve been paying attention to news this past year, it’s clear that much of venture capital isn’t just surviving 2020 – it’s flourishing through it. Zoom investing, it seems, is working just fine for cash-rich firms looking to double down on bets in categories from edtech to climate.

First up, New York-based USV submitted a pair of filings on late Thursday. The first filing shows that the firm has closed $151 million for USV Climate 2021, which one can assume is focused on climate-tech investments. As my colleague Jonathan Shieber has pointed out, climate tech.

The other, more nebulous filing, is the firm’s $22.4 million investment vehicle titled USV Bundled. It’s unclear what this is focused on, but a recent blog post suggests that the firm will continue to double down on its education investments.

Speaking of edtech, Learn Capital, an education-focused venture capital fund, filed paperwork indicating that it has closed $132 million in capital. It plans to raise a total of $250 million for this fund, which will be the firm’s fourth investment vehicle to date. The edtech category has obviously been booming with interest, which also fueled Owl Ventures to close $585 million in new capital in September.

Finally, I’ll give an honorable mention to Lattice CEO Jack Altman’s New Years Eve filing, which shows that the executive plans to raise $20 million for a new fund. It’s unclear if this filing indicates Apollo’s next step, a venture fund started by the Altman brothers. The trio, beyond Jack, includes Max and Sam, the former president of Y Combinator who currently serves as the CEO of OpenAI.

I reached out for comment to all three entities, but (unsurprisingly) haven’t heard back. It’s New Year’s Eve after all. So for now, back to the Champagne. See you all in the New Year.


Source: Tech Crunch

Bose’s latest sleep-centric earbuds mostly do the trick

It’s been a strange year for sleep. For me, levels have fluctuated between too little and too much, but have – more often than not – tended toward the former. 2020 gave most of us no shortage of excuses for sleep deprivation, from personal stresses to larger societal concerns.

And, thankfully, the past few years have seen no shortage of technological solutions to the problem of sleeplessness. Of course, the underpinning issues can be hard to isolate and even harder to treat. There’s no silver bullet. That’s the lesson I keep relearning at this job – no single piece of technology is going to cure all of my ills. (I’m sure it’s nothing that years of extensive and expensive therapy can’t fix.)

Sleep headphones are, in and of themselves, not an entirely new phenomenon. Bose got into the space in earnest back in mid-2018, offering one of the more polished (and pricey) approaches to the category. The company went in an entirely different direction than, say, Kokoon, which offers an over-ear solution.

The Sleepbuds are – as the name suggests – fully wireless earbuds. This second generation allows Bose to address some of the bigger issues with the original – include some major battery complaints. That was a pretty big strike against a $250 pair of headphones with, quite literally, one job.

The battery and connections complaints, I can state, off the bat, seem to have been addressed. The units I’ve been wearing to sleep off and on for a few weeks now haven’t had any major connection issues to speak of (assuming you keep your phone near your bed and all that entails), and the battery generally gets me through a full night bit a bit under 20% remaining. After you wake up, you toss them in the case and let them charge for the next several hours.

Image Credits: Bose

All told, the build is solid, as you’d expect/hope from the company name and accompanying price point. I really dig the design of these things, overall, from the illuminating metal charging case with its sliding lid to the earbuds themselves. As someone who finds the slightest irritants a major hurdle to falling asleep, I was pleasantly surprised by how unobtrusive the buds are. They slip on comfortably and stay flush with the ear, so nothing gets snagged. The soft and rubbery wings also do a great job keeping them in place.

The buds biggest limitation is actually by design. Like the originals, the Sleepbuds II only work with the included app. This is used to pair them, locate them and offers Bose’s library of music. The company generally does a good job curating its own sleep sounds, ranging from nature sounds like rain and wind to self-selected ambient tracks. I got in the habit of listening to the sounds of the ocean while reading Moby Dick each night. A pretty good way to fall asleep, all told.

I appreciate the decision to hamper the functionality to some degree – I suspect I would probably start listening to podcasts and TV shows on the thing, left to my own devices (so to speak). But I would love to see what the buds could do with, say, binaural beats or some other ambient selections. Ultimately, I think giving the consumer choice is ultimately a net positive.

That said, the headphones are well-tuned for their limited (but expanding) library of sounds. There’s no active noise canceling, but the passive cancelation of the buds themselves plus the on-board sound do a good job blocking out things like environmental noise or snoring. They’re probably no match for, say, construction noise, but do a good job with subtler barriers to sleep. They’ll also likely be a good choice for long flights, when we start doing those again.

There are a handful of headphones currently positioned for the sleep market, but Bose’s look to be the most polished package at the moment. The price will understandably be a barrier for many – and the limited sound library could be a dealbreaker for some. But if you have the money – and find getting and staying asleep tough – they’re well worth exploring.


Source: Tech Crunch

BadVR is using government grants to build a business that’s independent of venture capital

When the Los Angeles-based extended reality data visualization company, BadVR, first heard that one of its earliest benefactors, Magic Leap, was about to shed 1,000 jobs and was fighting for its life, the young startup was unfazed.

Despite the very public ties that BadVR had to Magic Leap, as one of the enterprise applications on the platform, the startup was more insulated than other businesses from the pivot away from consumer-focused apps.

The first step was finding money from the government’s Paycheck Protection Program to get more capital coming in and maintaining its headcount. Eventually, the company managed to land additional financing in the form of a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

It’s the second grant that the company has taken from the NSF and is an example of how startups can turn to government funding for capital and avoid some of the pitfalls of fundraising from venture capital.

To be sure, even Magic Leap’s trip to the brink of collapse wouldn’t have been that bad for BadVR, which makes enterprise applications for extended reality devices.

What the Magic Leap story shows is that companies don’t need to take venture capital to make it. Indeed, as costs come down for equipment and remote work democratizes access to a country that’s still teeming with engineering talent, thrifty startups can get the capital they need from government sources and corporate innovation grants.

That’s how BadVR got most of its $3.5 million in financing. Some money came from a grant from BadVR, while at least $1.25 million has come from the government in the form of two National Science Foundation cooperative agreements through the Small Business Innovation Research financing mechanisms.

A headset capture of BadVR’s climate change application, built for the Magic Leap One headset. Image Credit: BadVR

BadVR uses virtual and augmented reality tools to visualize geospatial data for a range of government and commercial applications. The startup’s tech is already being used by big telecom companies to accelerate the planning and deployment of 5G networks. And, within the public safety sector, the company’s tech is used to improve situational awareness for first responders and to reduce training, staffing, and operational costs.

“Society has become aware of the power of data and the impact it has on our daily lives.  It’s critically important that we make the access of data easy to every organization, regardless of technical skill level or background,” said Suzanne Borders, the chief executive and founder of BadVR, in a statement. 

For Borders, the key to tapping government funding is all about proper advance planning. “Those take a long time,” Borders said. “When you get awarded them, you’re looking at a year’s worth of effort. [Our grant] was a testament to us planning for that about a year ago.”

These grants are typically milestone-based, so as long as BadVR was hitting its targets, it could be fairly assured that the money would be there.

“NSF is proud to support the technology of the future by thinking beyond incremental  developments and funding the most creative, impactful ideas across all markets and  areas of science and engineering,” said Andrea Belz, Division Director of the Division of  Industrial Innovation and Partnerships at NSF. “With the support of our research funds,  any deep technology startup or small business can guide basic science into meaningful  solutions that address tremendous needs.”  

Other government competitions are providing the company with additional non-dilutive cash and a chance to kcik the tires on new capabilities.

A capture from BadVR’s augmented reality geospatial data environment, which allows users to visualize multiple live and historical datasets via overlays relevant to their environment. Image Credit: BadVR

That has translated into traction for the company’s Augmented Reality Operations Center. The AROC is a new offering for the product that visualizes data for first responders. Through a challenge hosted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, BadVR was able to work with the Eureka, Mo. Fire Department to develop a prototype for a specific emergency situation.

It’s an evolution of an early product the company had developed where enterprises can create digital twins of their factories or stores in virtual reality and do a walk-through to examine different conditions.

The visualization work that BadVR does isn’t necessarily all geo-spatial. The company can take all kinds of data and integrate that into an environment that makes the data easier to see. Borders sees the company’s services extending into creating all kinds of collaborative environments for companies.

“The system highlights things that are important to look at,” Borders said. “It’s virtualizing the data visualization experience and bringing it into an immersive environment — and building a more collaborative aspect to that experience.”

Since the COVID-19 pandemic has forced businesses across the country to operate virtually, Borders said the demand for the kinds of. products her company is building — with the government’s help — has only increased.

“That’s been due to increased demand for remote collaboration tools,” Borders said. “We’ve had increased interest in people across the board — but tools that have remote collaboration capabilities — and bring people together to one immersive data experience… those are taking off.”


Source: Tech Crunch

Goodbye Flash, goodbye FarmVille

While much of what made 2020 such an absolute nightmare will still be with us on January 1 (sorry!), we will really, truly be leaving Adobe Flash and FarmVille behind as we enter the new year.

The end of Flash has been a long time coming. The plugin, which was first released in 1996 and once supported a broad swath online content, has become increasingly irrelevant in a smartphone-centric world: iPhones never supported Flash, and it’s been just over 10 years since Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs published an open letter outlining the technology’s shortcomings.

Adobe has been planning for the end, announcing in 2017 that it would phase out Flash by the end of this year. Most web browsers have already stopped supporting Flash, and today is the official end date, with Adobe ending support itself — although there’s still one last “death of Flash” milestone on January 12, when the company will begin to block Flash content from playing.

In related news, Zynga announced recently that the end of Flash would also mean the end of FarmVille, since the game relies on the Flash plugin.

Like Flash, FarmVille feels like a remnant of a bygone internet era (a fact that makes me feel incredibly old, since I wrote plenty of words about both of them at the beginning of my career). Launched in 2009, FarmVille’s popularity paved the way for the ascendance of Zynga and of Facebook gaming, but both Zynga and gaming have largely moved on.

The company’s co-founder and former CEO Mark Pincus commemorated the occasion with a series of tweets outlining the game’s early development (spurred by the acquisition of startup MyMiniLife).

“FarmVille demonstrated that a game could be a living, always-on service that could deliver daily surprise and delight, similar to a favorite TV series,” Pincus wrote. “Games could also connect groups of people and bring them closer together.”

And just in case there are any FarmVille fans reading this story, don’t worry: you can still play FarmVille 2: Tropic Escape, FarmVille 2: Country Escape right now, and FarmVille 3 is still coming to mobile. Today is just the final day for the original game.


Source: Tech Crunch

After burning through $2 billion, Katerra gets a $200 million SoftBank lifeline to escape bankruptcy

SoftBank Group is reportedly investing $200 million to bail out Katerra, a startup that had hoped to remake the construction industry with a vertically integrated approach, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Katerra’s shareholders reportedly approved the new investment on Wednesday, with the new lifeline from SoftBank coming on top of roughly $2 billion that the Japanese technology conglomerate had already committed to the venture.

Funds for the bailout, which will save Katerra from bankruptcy, will be coming from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 1, the Journal quoted Katerra chief executive Paal Kibsgaard as telling company shareholders in a message.

As part of the funding, the SoftBank-financed financial services firm, Greensill Capital, is cancelling around $435 million in debt in exchange for a 5% stake in the company, according to the Journal’s reporting.

This new bailout actually marks the second time that SoftBank has stepped in to dole out $200 million to Katerra this year alone.

In May, when Kibsgaard, the former head of oil services developer Schlumberger, was brought in to fix the company’s finances, SoftBank poured $200 million into the company so Kibsgaard could right the ship there, according to the Journal’s reporting.

Katerra has raised multiple hundreds of million dollar rounds from the Japanese technology conglomerate since its launch in 2015. Back in 2018, when the company closed on $865 million in financing, Katerra was claiming bookings for $1.3 billion worth of commercial and residential projects ranging from hospitality to student housing. That’s a large number, but a fraction of the $1 trillion spent on construction in the month of November 2018 alone, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Katerra has been hit by delays and cost overruns on some projects, while the COVID-19 pandemic delayed others. And irregularities that the company discovered in accounting practices also added to headaches, according to the Journal.

Despite its missteps, Katerra is on track to make serious cash this year, with revenue between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, according to details Kibsgaard gave to the Journal.


Source: Tech Crunch

How artificial intelligence will be used in 2021

Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang doesn’t need a crystal ball to see where artificial intelligence will be used in the future. He just looks at his customer list.

The four-year-old startup, which recently hit a valuation of more than $3.5 billion, got its start supplying autonomous vehicle companies with the labeled data needed to train machine learning models to develop and eventually commercialize robotaxis, self-driving trucks and automated bots used in warehouses and on-demand delivery.

The wider adoption of AI across industries has been a bit of a slow burn over the past several years as company founders and executives begin to understand what the technology could do for their businesses.

In 2020, that changed as e-commerce, enterprise automation, government, insurance, real estate and robotics companies turned to Scale’s visual data labeling platform to develop and apply artificial intelligence to their respective businesses. Now, the company is preparing for the customer list to grow and become more varied.

How 2020 shaped up for AI

Scale AI’s customer list has included an array of autonomous vehicle companies including Alphabet, Voyage, nuTonomy, Embark, Nuro and Zoox. While it began to diversify with additions like Airbnb, DoorDash and Pinterest, there were still sectors that had yet to jump on board. That changed in 2020, Wang said.

Scale began to see incredible use cases of AI within the government as well as enterprise automation, according to Wang. Scale AI began working more closely with government agencies this year and added enterprise automation customers like States Title, a residential real estate company.

Wang also saw an increase in uses around conversational AI, in both consumer and enterprise applications as well as growth in e-commerce as companies sought out ways to use AI to provide personalized recommendations for its customers that were on par with Amazon.

Robotics continued to expand as well in 2020, although it spread to use cases beyond robotaxis, autonomous delivery and self-driving trucks, Wang said.

“A lot of the innovations that have happened within the self-driving industry, we’re starting to see trickle out throughout a lot of other robotics problems,” Wang said. “And so it’s been super exciting to see the breadth of AI continue to broaden and serve our ability to support all these use cases.”

The wider adoption of AI across industries has been a bit of a slow burn over the past several years as company founders and executives begin to understand what the technology could do for their businesses, Wang said, adding that advancements in natural language processing of text, improved offerings from cloud companies like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud and greater access to datasets helped sustain this trend.

“We’re finally getting to the point where we can help with computational AI, which has been this thing that’s been pitched for forever,” he said.

That slow burn heated up with the COVID-19 pandemic, said Wang, noting that interest has been particularly strong within government and enterprise automation as these entities looked for ways to operate more efficiently.

“There was this big reckoning,” Wang said of 2020 and the effect that COVID-19 had on traditional business enterprises.

If the future is mostly remote with consumers buying online instead of in-person, companies started to ask, “How do we start building for that?,” according to Wang.

The push for operational efficiency coupled with the capabilities of the technology is only going to accelerate the use of AI for automating processes like mortgage applications or customer loans at banks, Wang said, who noted that outside of the tech world there are industries that still rely on a lot of paper and manual processes.


Source: Tech Crunch

Salesforce has built a deep bench of executive talent via acquisition

When Salesforce acquired Quip in 2016 for $750 million, it gained CEO and co-founder Bret Taylor as part of the deal. Taylor has since risen quickly through the ranks of the software giant to become president and COO, second in command behind CEO Marc Benioff. Taylor’s experience shows that startup founders can sometimes play a key role in the companies that acquire them.

Benioff, 56, has been running Salesforce since its founding more than 20 years ago. While he hasn’t given any public hints that he intends to leave anytime soon, if he wanted to step back from the day-to-day running of the company or even job share the role, he has a deep bench of executive talent including many experienced CEOs, who like Taylor came to the company via acquisition.

One way to step back from the enormous responsibility of running Salesforce would be by sharing the role.

He and his wife Lynne have been active in charitable giving and in 2016 signed The Giving Pledge, an initiative from the The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to give a majority of their wealth to philanthropy. One could see him wanting to put more time into pursuing these charitable endeavors just as Gates did 20 years ago. As a means of comparison, Gates founded Microsoft in 1975 and stayed for 25 years until he left in 2000 to run his charitable foundation full time.

Even if this remains purely speculative for the moment, there is a group of people behind him with deep industry experience, who could be well-suited to take over should the time ever come.

Resurrecting the co-CEO role

One way to step back from the enormous responsibility of running Salesforce would be by sharing the role. In fact, for more than a year starting in 2018, Benioff actually shared the top job with Keith Block until his departure last year. When they worked together, the arrangement seemed to work out just fine with Block dealing with many larger customers and helping the software giant reach its $20 billion revenue goal.

Before Block became co-CEO, he had a myriad other high-level titles including co-chairman, president and COO — two of which, by the way, Taylor has today. That was a lot of responsibility for one person inside a company the size of Salesforce, but promoting him to co-CEO from COO gave the company a way to reward his hard work and help keep him from jumping ship (he eventually did anyway).

As Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research points out, the co-CEO concept has worked out well at major enterprise companies that have tried it in the past, and it helped with continuity. “Salesforce, SAP and Oracle all didn’t miss a beat really with the co-CEO departures,” he said.

If Benioff wanted to go back to the shared responsibility model and take some work off his plate, making Taylor (or someone else) co-CEO would be one way to achieve that. Certainly, Brent Leary, lead analyst at CRM Essentials sees Taylor gaining increasing responsibility as time goes along, giving credence to the idea.

“Ever since Quip was acquired Taylor seemed to be on the fast track, becoming president and chief product officer less than a year-and-a-half after the acquisition, and then two years later being promoted to chief operating officer,” Leary said.

Who else could be in line?

While Taylor isn’t the only person who could step into Benioff’s shoes, he looks like he has the best shot at the moment, especially in light of the $27.7 billion Slack deal he helped deliver earlier this month.

“Taylor being publicly praised by Benioff for playing a significant role in the Slack acquisition, Salesforce’s largest acquisition to date, shows how much he has solidified his place at the highest levels of influence and decision-making in the organization,” Leary pointed out.

But Mueller posits that his rapid promotions could also show something might be lacking with internal options, especially around product. “Taylor is a great, smart guy, but his rise shows more the product organization bench depth challenges that Salesforce has,” he said.


Source: Tech Crunch

The Equity crew predicts what’s to come in 2021

What could go wrong?

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. As you can see, this is our yearly predictions episode. Our behind-the-scenes guru Chris Gates joins us on the mic, we take shots at our prior prognostications, and nosh on what we feel is positively persaged.

As always, this episode is in good fun. If you don’t agree with we think is up ahead, that’s fine. You’re probably right. But we’re nothing if not up for a challenge, so we kept the tradition alive this year.

This is the last Equity episode of 2020. While we can’t tell you yet what our plans are for 2021, we can say — nay, project — that there are a lot of fun and big things coming for Equity. We’re planning our busiest year ever, by far.

And with that, we’re out of here. Thanks for several million downloads this year, our biggest annum to date.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotify and all the casts.


Source: Tech Crunch

Samsung vice chairman Jay Y. Lee faces nine-year sentence in bribery case

Samsung Electronics vice chairman Jay Y. Lee faces a nine-year prison term in the bribery case that contributed to the downfall of former president Park Guen-hye. Prosecutors argued that the length of the sentence is warranted because of Samsung’s power as the largest chaebol, or family-owned conglomerate, in South Korea.

“Samsung is a group with such overwhelming power that it is said Korean companies are divided into Samsung and non-Samsung,” they said during a final hearing on Wednesday, reports the Korea Herald. The final ruling is scheduled for January 18.

The bribery case is separate from another trial Lee is involved in, over alleged accounting fraud and stock-price manipulation. Hearings in that case began in October.

The bribery case dates back to 2017, when Lee was convicted of bribing Park and her close associate Choi Soon-sil and sentenced to five years in prison. Prosecutors allege the bribes were meant to secure government backing for Lee’s attempt to inherit control of Samsung from his father Lee Kun-hee, then its chairman. The illegal payments were a major part of the corruption scandal that led to Park’s impeachment, arrest and 25-year prison sentence.

Lee was freed in 2018 after the sentence was reduced and suspended on appeal, and returned to work as Samsung’s de facto head, a position he took after his father had a heart attack in 2014.

In August 2019, however, the Supreme Court overturned the appeals court, ruling that it was too lenient, and ordered that the case be retried in Seoul High Court.

The elder Lee, who was reportedly South Korea’s wealthiest citizen, died in October. He was worth an estimated $20.7 billion and under the country’s tax system, he and his heirs could be liable for estate taxes of about $10 billion, reported Fortune.

TechCrunch has contacted Samsung for comment.


Source: Tech Crunch

Elon Musk says SpaceX will attempt to recover Super Heavy rocket by catching it with launch tower

SpaceX will try a significantly different approach to landing its future reusable rocket boosters, according to CEO and founder Elon Musk. It will attempt to ‘catch’ the heavy booster, which is currently in development, using the launch tower arm used to stabilize the vehicle during its pre-takeoff preparations. Current Falcon 9 boosters return to Earth and land propulsively on their own built-in legs – but the goal with Super Heavy is for the larger rocket not to have legs at all, says Musk.

The Super Heavy launch process will still involve use of its engines to control the velocity of its descent, but it will involve using the grid fins that are included on its main body to help control its orientation during flight to ‘catch’ the booster – essentially hooking it using the launch tower arm before it touches the ground at all. The main benefits of this method, which will obviously involve a lot of precision maneuvering, is that it means SpaceX can save both cost and weight by omitting landing legs from the Super Heavy design altogether.

Another potential benefit raised by Musk is that it could allow SpaceX to essentially recycle the Super Heavy booster immediately back on the launch mount it returns to – possibly enabling it to be ready to fly again with a new payload and upper stage (consisting of Starship, the other spacecraft SpaceX is currently developing and testing) in “under an hour.”

The goal for Starship and Super Heavy is to create a launch vehicle that’s even more reusable than SpaceX’s current Falcon 9 (and Falcon Heavy) system. Eventually, the goal for Musk is to have Starship making regular and frequent flights – for point-to-point flight on Earth, for orbital missions closer to home, and for long-distance runs to the Moon and Mars. The pace at which he envisions these happening in order to make it possible to colonize Mars with a continuous human population requires the kind of rapid recycling and reflying of Super Heavy he described today with this proposed new landing method.

Starship prototypes are currently being constructed and tested in Boca Chica, Texas, where SpaceX has been flying the pre-production spaceship during the past year. The company is also working on elements of the Super Heavy booster, and Musk said recently that it intends to begin actively flight-testing that component of the launch system in a few months’ time.


Source: Tech Crunch