These robo-fish autonomously form schools and work as search parties

Researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have created a set of fish-shaped underwater robots that can autonomously navigate and find each other, cooperating to perform tasks or just placidly school together.

Just as aerial drones are proving themselves useful in industry after industry, underwater drones could revolutionize ecology, shipping, and other areas where a persistent underwater presence is desirable but difficult.

The last few years have seen interesting new autonomous underwater vehicles, or AUVs, but the most common type is pretty much a torpedo — efficient for cruising open water, but not for working one’s way through the nooks and crannies of a coral reef or marina.

For that purpose, it seems practical to see what Nature herself has seen fit to create, and the Wyss Institute has made a specialty of doing so and creating robots and machinery in imitation of the natural world.

In this case Florian Berlinger, Melvin Gauci, and Radhika Nagpa, all co-authors on a new paper published in Science Robotics, decided to imitate not just the shape of a fish, but the way it interacts with its fellows as well.

Having been inspired by the sight of schooling fish during scuba diving, Nagpa has pursued the question: “How do we create artificial agents that can demonstrate this kind of collective coherence where a whole collective seems as if it’s a single agent?”

Diagram of a fish-shaped robot

Image Credits: Berlinger et al., Science Robotics

Their answer, Blueswarm, is a collection of small “Bluebots” 3D-printed in the shape of fish, with fins instead of propellers and cameras for eyes. Although neither you nor I is likely to mistake these for actual fish, they’re far less scary of an object for a normal fish to see than a six-foot metal tube with a propeller spinning loudly in the back. The Bluebots also imitate nature’s innovation of bioluminescence, lighting up with LEDs the way some fish and insects do to signal others. The LED pulses change and adjust depending on each bot’s position and knowledge of its neighbors.

Using the simple senses of cameras and a photosensor at the very front, elementary swimming motions, and the LEDs, Blueswarm automatically organizes itself into group swimming behaviors, establishing a simple “milling” pattern that accommodates new bots when they’re dropped in from any angle.

Images showing how "bluebots" swarm intelligently and find each other.

Image Credits: Berlinger et al, Science Robotics

The robots can also work together on simple tasks, like searching for something. If the group is given the task of finding a red LED in the tank they’re in, they can each look independently, but when one of them finds it, it alters its own LED flashing to alert and summon the others.

It’s not hard to imagine uses for this tech. These robots could get closer to reefs and other natural features safely without alarming the sea life, monitoring their health or looking for specific objects their camera-eyes could detect. Or they could meander around underneath docks and ships inspecting hulls more efficiently than a single craft can. Perhaps they might even be useful in search and rescue.

The research also advances our understanding of how and why animals swarm together in the first place.

With this research, we cannot only build more advanced robot collectives, but also learn about collective intelligence in nature. Fish must follow even simpler behavior patterns when swimming in schools than our robots do. This simplicity is so beautiful yet hard to discover,” said Berlinger. “Other researchers have reached out to me already to use my Bluebots as fish surrogates for biological studies on fish swimming and schooling. The fact that they welcome Bluebot among their laboratory fish makes me very happy.”


Source: Tech Crunch

Venture capitalists react to Visa-Plaid deal meltdown

Congratulations, you’re no longer selling your company for billions of dollars!

As strange as it sounds, that’s the leading perspective from venture capitalists concerning Plaid, now that its much-touted sale to Visa has fallen apart.

The $5.3 billion deal would have seen banking API startup Plaid join consumer payments and credit giant Visa. But the American government took a dim view of the deal, and according to Axios reporting, Plaid felt like it could be worth more money in time.

The TechCrunch team has collected views from venture capitalists, analysts and Anshu Sharma, CEO of another API-powered startup and a former VC to get a better view on the perspectives in the market concerning the blockbuster breakup.

From the venture capital side of things, most takes we received were bullish regarding Plaid’s chances now that it’s no longer being taken over by Visa. Amy Cheetham, for example, of Costanoa Ventures, said that the result is “good for the company, ultimately.” She added that Plaid may now see better “talent acquisition,” faster product decisions and a better eventual valuation.

“There is so much left for them to build in fintech infrastructure,” Cheetham said in an email, adding that she sees “Stripe-like scale potential” in Plaid. Stripe is reportedly raising capital at a valuation that could reach $100 billion.

Cheetham is not alone in her bullish perspective. Nico Berandi of Animo Ventures wrote to TechCrunch to say that he “still wishes” that his firm had been “around back then to have invested” in Plaid, adding a smiley face at the end of his missive.


Source: Tech Crunch

Pat Gelsinger stepping down as VMware CEO to replace Bob Swan at Intel

In a move that could have wide ramifications across the tech landscape, Intel announced that VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger would be replacing interim CEO Bob Swann at Intel on February 15th. The question is why would he leave his job to run a struggling chip giant.

The bottom line is he has a long history with Intel, working with some of the biggest names in chip industry lore before he joined VMware in 2009. It has to be a thrill for him to go back to his roots and try to jump start the company.

“I was 18 years old when I joined Intel, fresh out of the Lincoln Technical Institute. Over the next 30 years of my tenure at Intel, I had the honor to be mentored at the feet of Grove, Noyce and Moore,” Gelsinger wrote in a blog post announcing his new position.

Certainly Intel recognized that the history and that Gelsinger’s deep executive experience should help as the company attempts to compete in an increasingly aggressive chip industry landscape. “Pat is a proven technology leader with a distinguished track record of innovation, talent development, and a deep knowledge of Intel. He will continue a values-based cultural leadership approach with a hyper focus on operational execution,” Omar Ishrak, independent chairman of the Intel board said in a statement.

But Gelsinger is walking into a bit of a mess. As my colleague Danny Crichton wrote in his year-end review of the chip industry last month, Intel is far behind its competitors, and it’s going to be tough to play catch-up:

Intel has made numerous strategic blunders in the past two decades, most notably completely missing out on the smartphone revolution and also the custom silicon market that has come to prominence in recent years. It’s also just generally fallen behind in chip fabrication, an area it once dominated and is now behind Taiwan-based TSMC, Crichton wrote.

Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy agrees with this assertion, saying that Swan was dealt a bad hand, walking in to clean up a mess that has years long timelines. While Gelsinger faces similar issues, Moorhead thinks he can refocus the company. “I am not foreseeing any major strategic changes with Gelsinger, but I do expect him to focus on the company’s engineering culture and get it back to an execution culture” Moorhead told me.

The announcement comes against the backdrop of massive chip industry consolidation last year with over $100 billion changing hands in four deals with NVidia nabbing ARM for $40 billion, the $35 billion AMD-Xilink deal, Analog snagging Maxim for $21 billion and Marvell grabbing Inphi for a mere $10 billion, not to mention Intel dumping its memory unit to SK Hynix for $9 billion.

As for VMware, it has to find a new CEO now. As Moorhead says, the obvious choice would be current COO Sanjay Poonen, but for the time being, it will be CFO Zane Rowe serving as interim CEO, rather than Poonen. In fact, it appears that the company will be casting a wider net than internal options. The official announcement states, “VMware’s Board of Directors is initiating a global executive search process to name a permanent CEO…”

Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research says it will be up to Michael Dell who to hand the reins to, but he believes Gelsinger was stuck at Dell and would not get a broader role, so he left.

“VMware has a deep bench, but it will be up to Michael Dell to get a CEO who can innovate on the software side and keep the unique DNA of VMware inside the Dell portfolio going strong, Dell needs the deeper profits of this business for its turnaround,” he said.

The stock market seems to like the move for Intel with the company stock up 7.26%, but not so much for VMware, whose stock was down close to the same amount at 7.72% as went to publication.


Source: Tech Crunch

Weber acquires smart cooking startup June

Outdoor cooking industry leader and famed Kettle grill-maker Weber has acquired June, the smart cooking startup founded in 2013 by Matt Van Horn and Nikhil Bhogal. While financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, Weber has confirmed that June will continue to operate as its own branded wholly owned by Weber-Stephen Products, and will continue to both sell and develop the June Oven and related products. Meanwhile, June co-founder Nikhil Bhogal will take on a role as SVP of Technology and Connected Devices across the Weber lineup.

Weber had already teamed up with June, with the startup providing the technology and expertise behind its Weber Connect smart grilling platform. That includes both the Weber Connect Smart Grilling Hub, which adds connected smart grill features to any grill, and the built-in smart cooking features on its SmokeFire line of wood pellet grills. That partnership began with a cold email Van Horn received in 2018 from then-Weber CEO and current Executive Chairman Jim Stephen, the son of the company’s original founder.

“He said he was a fan, he was a customer, and he couldn’t imagine a future without June technology powering every product in the Weber collection,” Van Horn told me in an interview. “I said, ‘Slow down –what are you talking about? Yeah, who are you?’ And he said ‘I’m flying out, I’ll be there Monday.’” I normally have my nice demo setup that I do, I’ll do like chocolate lava cake and a steak [in the June Oven]. So I got there about 15 minutes early to do that, and [Jim] was already sitting in the front steps of the office, ready to open the door for me – he’s like, ‘I don’t need a demo, I own this.’”

“His energy and, and ability to see things often before other people, it blew my mind,” Van Horn continued. “Soon after I met Chris [Scherzinger, Weber’s current chief executive], who was was joining as CEO, and was able to experience firsthand this, honestly very surprising and wonderful culture of this historic Weber brand.”

As mentioned, June became a partner to Weber and powered the connected cooking platform it debuted at CES last year. Weber also led June’s Series C funding round, a previously undisclosed final round of financing that Weber led in 2018 prior to this exit.

Van Horn will act as President of June under the terms of the new arrangement, and will continue to lead development of its current and future products. He said that Weber’s ability to help them with international scale and distribution, via their existing global footprint, was a big motivating factor in why June chose to join the now 63-year old company. But another key ingredient was just how much Weber proved to be a place where the company’s culture was still centered on customer focus and a love of food.

“Obviously why Nikhil and I started June was that we love food, and we love cooking,” Van Horn said. “And a lot of the principles of how we think about how products get made are a lot of Apple’s principles – a large percentage of the June team comes from Apple. We’ve obviously kind of brought that to a microscale with our small 60 person startup. But being able to work with this very eager Weber team, that’s just been really excited from the start has been pretty incredible.”

As for Weber, the company gains a software and technology team that was born out of the idea of approaching cooking from a tech-first perspective – and they intend to infuse that expertise throughout their product lineup, with an eye towards building on their legacy of quality and customer enthusiasm.

“Once you infuse the the software engineering, and the connected product design, and the machine intelligence expertise that you have, you get these core competencies or capabilities, but that really undersells it,” Scherzinger told me. “Matt put together a team of superstars, and and we just got a first-round draft pick [in June] that takes the Weber game to another level. That allows us to accelerate a significant number of initiatives, and you can, you can expect to see an expansion of what Weber Connect can become in terms of new experiences for consumers, new services, and new products, for sure, starting as early as 2021, and 2022.”

While Weber and June are not sharing specifics around the deal, as mentioned, Scherzinger did mentions that “Matt and his team and his investors all did handsomely.” June’s prior investors include Amazon Alexa Fund, Lerer Hippeau, First Round Capital, Promus Ventures, Industry Ventures, Eclipse Ventures and more.


Source: Tech Crunch

These 5 VCs have high hopes for cannabis in 2021

Cannabis has always been essential to some. Thanks to COVID-19, cannabis is now an essential business and many companies are entering 2021 after seeing huge gains in 2020.

TechCrunch surveyed five key investors who touch different aspects of the cannabis business. We asked these investors the same six questions, and each provided similar thoughts, but different approaches. Despite remaining headwinds, the future is looking up for most cannabis businesses, according to these investors.

Morgan Paxhia, managing director of Poseidon Investment Management, put it this way: “2021 could be nothing short of amazing for our industry. We expect capital flows to pick up massively from pent-up demand, good public markets bringing more IPOs, lots of M&A and new innovative startups coming on scene. We see opportunity with social equity for the first time, driven by private markets rather than poorly constructed regulations. It’s going to be fun!”

  • Morgan Paxhia, managing director, Poseidon Investment Management
  • Anthony Coniglio, CEO, NewLake Capital
  • Emily Paxhia, managing partner, Poseidon Investment Management
  • Matt Shalhoub, managing partner, Green Acre Capital
  • Jerel Registre, managing director, Curio WMBE Fund

Morgan Paxhia, managing director, Poseidon Investment Management

2020 was a blockbuster year for cannabis. What advice are you giving your portfolio companies entering 2021?

Typical mantra for us, stay focused. Markets, deals and valuations are volatile in our industry but we all have to do our best to tune out the noise and focus. I’d say a great example of a team with focus is GTI. They have executed against a strategy while many of their supposed peers have done very irrational deals, impaired shareholder value, etc. GTI continues to march down its path and their results are showing.

How is COVID-19 changing the cannabis landscape?

2020 was an inward-facing year as most companies could not travel, capital was tight and macro was uncertain. This inward work has led to a lot of fundamental improvements for operators. There are others that got one last puff of wind but their businesses are too impaired and will continue to fall to the wayside.

2021 could be nothing short of amazing for our industry. We expect capital flows to pick up massively from pent-up demand, good public markets bringing more IPOs, lots of M&A and new innovative startups coming on scene. We see opportunity with social equity for the first time, driven by private markets rather than poorly constructed regulations. It’s going to be fun!

From retail to SaaS to research, there’s a lot of inroads to investing in cannabis. What sector of the business do you see has the best opportunity for growth in 2021?

We are bullish on select state markets. For example, new adult-use markets in NJ and AZ and existing markets with new growth prospects opening in CA and NY.

SaaS could get very interesting as there are several players reaching scale that are garnering mainstream attention.
International opportunity is mostly Mexico. It is the largest federally legal market that will just be opening in 2021. Many have not taken this one seriously but we have and are very proud of the efforts that went to moving such a monumental step forward.

The history of drug enforcement in the United States has been deeply unjust and racist; as we enter a period of growing legalization, are there things that startups and investors can do to address that inequity?

The industry, meaning established companies, entrepreneurs and investors need to drive solutions here. Regulations have been terrible and only exacerbate the issue. We have been putting a lot of thought into this area for years, watching various aspects such as the missteps taken by government and the unfortunate poor intentions from supposed investors.

We see a path emerging here that is collaborative, simple and should be attractive to capital providers. Stay tuned.

Who are some leaders in the cannabis space — companies, founders, growers?

  • My sister Emily is a co-founder and rock star! She is a true leader in this space on so many levels.
  • Ahmer Iqbal, CEO of Sublime — Ahmer took the role at a very challenging time and with very little capital was able to rebuild the company into a leader in the CA market.
  • Jason Wild — Not only is he a savvy investor, he puts his money where his mouth is. Outside of Poseidon, I do not know any other person in this industry that puts up so much of their own money into what they believe in.
  • Coleman Beale, CEO of Bastcore — If you are not familiar with the industrial hemp renaissance in the U.S., look no further. This technology-driven hemp-processing company is rejuvenating textiles in the U.S., using domestically grown hemp and processing for uses in such textiles as denim.


    Source: Tech Crunch

E-commerce infrastructure startup Nacelle closes $18M Series A

Consumer online shopping habits have led to a windfall of revenues for these web storefronts, but COVID-era trends have also breathed new life into the market for developer tools that help e-commerce sites operate more smoothly for shoppers.

LA-based Nacelle is one of many e-commerce infrastructure startups to earn attention from investors amid COVID.

The web services company helps streamline the backends of e-commerce websites with a so-called “headless” platform that shifts how the front end of websites interact with content in the back end. The startup claims its tech can boost performance, promote better scalability, cut down on hosting costs and offer developers a more streamlined experience.

Nacelle has closed an $18 million Series A led by Inovia with participation from Accomplice, Index Ventures, High Alpha, Silas Capital and Lerer Hippeau. The company just closed a $4.8 million seed round in mid-2020, the speedy pace of their Series A’s close seems to speak to the investor enthusiasm that has deepened around companies operating in the e-commerce world.

“It’s not secret that commerce has done well during COVID,” CEO Brian Anderson tells TechCrunch. “Not only did we get this subtle structural change with COVID that I believe is long-lasting, but merchants have been focusing more on performance.”

One of the startup’s central points of focus has been ensuring that they can bring customers onboard its platform without causing undue headaches. It can be “very painful to migrate data” with other services, Anderson says. The company’s service is “anti-rip-and-replace,” meaning potential customers can integrate “without having to be rebuild their stores.”

The firm’s customer base is largely made up of small- to medium-sized e-commerce sites. Nacelle works closely with agencies for customer referrals, also tapping on Anderson’s past contacts from his days running a Shopify Plus agency.

This past August, data from IBM’s U.S. Retail Index suggested that pandemic trends had accelerated the consumer shift from primarily visiting to physical stores to shopping on e-commerce storefronts by roughly five years.


Source: Tech Crunch

Gett raises $115M more for its on-demand ride-hailing platform for business users

As ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft continue to find their feet in a new landscape for transportation services — where unessential travel is being actively discouraged in many markets, and people remain concerned about catching the coronavirus in restricted, shared spaces — a smaller player that has carved out a place for itself targeting business users is announcing more funding.

Gett, which started out as a more direct competitor to the likes of Uber and Lyft but now focuses mainly on ground transportation services for business clients in major cities around the world, said in a short statement that it has closed a round of $115 million. The company — co-headquartered in London and Israel — also said it is now “operationally profitable” and is hitting its budget targets.

The funding is being led by new backer Pelham Capital Investments Ltd. and also included participation from unnamed existing investors.

Including this round, Gett has now raised $965 million, with past investors including VW, Access and its founder Len BlavatnikKreos, MCI and more. Gett’s last confirmed valuation was $1.5 billion, pegged to a $200 million fundraise in May 2019. It’s not talking about current valuation, or any recent customer numbers, today.

Dave Waiser, Gett’s founder and CEO, described the funding earlier today in a note to me as an extension to the company’s previous round, a $100 million equity investment that it announced in July last year.

Chairman Amos Genish, said in a statement that the funding round was oversubscribed, “which shows the market’s interest in our platform and long term vision. Gett is disrupting and transforming a fragmented market delivering ever-critical cost optimisation and client satisfaction.”

The company has been building out a focus on the B2B market for several years now — a smart way of avoiding the expensive and painful race to compete like-for-like against the Ubers of the world — and this most recent round (which now totals $215 million) is focused on doubling down on that.

The Gett of the past — it was originally founded in 2010 under the name GetTaxi — did indeed try to build a business around both consumers and higher-end users, but the idea behind Gett today is to focus on corporate accounts.

Gett provides those businesses’ employees with a predictable and reliable app-based platform to make it easier to order car services wherever they happen to be traveling, and those businesses — which in the past would have used a fragmented mix of local services — then have a consolidated way of managing, accounting for and analysing those travel expenses. It claims to be able to save companies some 25-40% in costs.

The company previously said that its network covered some 1,500 cities. In certain metropolitan areas like London and Moscow, Gett provides transportation services directly. In markets where it does not have direct operations (such as anywhere in the U.S., including New York), it partners with third parties, such as Lyft.

“We are on a journey to transform corporate ground travel and I’m delighted that investors find our model attractive,” Waiser said in a statement today. “This investment will allow us to further develop our SaaS technology and deepen our proposition within the corporate ground travel market.”


Source: Tech Crunch

Gig workers, SEIU file lawsuit alleging Prop 22 is unconstitutional

A group of rideshare drivers in California and the Service Employees International Union filed a lawsuit today alleging Proposition 22 violates California’s constitution. The goal of the suit is to overturn Prop 22, which classifies gig workers as independent contractors in California.

The suit, filed in California’s Supreme Court, argues Prop 22 makes it harder for the state’s legislature to create and enforce a workers’ compensation system for gig workers. It also argues Prop 22 violates the rule that limits ballot measures to a single issue, as well as unconstitutionally defines what would count as an amendment to the measure. As it stands today, Prop 22 requires a seven-eights legislative supermajority in order to amend the measure.

“Every day, rideshare drivers like me struggle to make ends meet because companies like Uber and Lyft prioritize corporate profits over our wellbeing,” Saori Okawa, a plaintiff in the case, said in a statement. “With Prop 22, they’re not just ignoring our health and safety — they’re discarding our state’s constitution. I’m joining this lawsuit because I know it’s up to the people we elect to make our laws, not wealthy  executives who profit from our labor. I’m confident the court will see Prop 22 for the corporate power grab that it is, and that Prop 22 will live in infamy along with unconstitutional ballot measures like Prop 8 and Prop 187.”

This suit is the latest in a long battle between gig workers and tech companies. Meanwhile, Uber and Lyft have their eyes on pursuing Prop 22-like legislation elsewhere. Given Uber and Lyft’s anti-gig-workers-as-employees stance, it came as no surprise when Uber and Lyft separately said they would pursue similar legislation in other parts of the country and the world.

Uber, Lyft and DoorDash were not immediately available for comment. But the group behind Yes on 22, Protect App Based Jobs & Services, provided a statement to TechCrunch:

“Nearly 10 million California voters — including the vast majority of app-based drivers — passed Prop 22 to protect driver independence, while providing historic new protections,” Jim Pyatt, an Uber driver who supported Prop 22, said in a statement. “Voters across the political spectrum spoke loud and clear, passing Prop 22 in a landslide. Meritless lawsuits that seek to undermine the clear democratic will of the people do not stand up to scrutiny in the courts.”


Source: Tech Crunch

Snap acquires location data startup StreetCred

Snapchat’s parent company Snap has acquired StreetCred, a New York City startup building a platform for location data.

Snap confirmed the news to TechCrunch and said the acquisition will result in four StreetCred team members — including co-founders Randy Meech and Diana Shkolnikov — joining the company, where they’ll be working on map- and location-related products.

A big component of that strategy is the Snap Map, which allows users to view public snaps from a given area and to share their location with friends. Last summer, the Snap Map was added to Snapchat’s main navigation bar, and the company announced that the product was reaching 200 million users every month.

At the same time, Snapchat has been adding other products that tie into a user’s locations, such as Local Lenses, which allow developers to create geography-specific augmented reality lenses that interact with physical locations.

Meech and Shkolnikov should be bringing plenty of mapping experience to Snap — Meech was formerly CEO at Samsung’s open mapping subsidiary Mapzen, and before that the senior vice president of local and mapping products at TechCrunch’s parent company AOL (subsequently rebranded as Verizon Media). Shkolnikov, meanwhile, is the former engineering director at Mapzen.

StreetCred had raised $1 million in seed funding from Bowery Capital and Notation Capital. When I spoke to Meech in 2018, he said his goal was to “open up and decentralize” location data by building a blockchain-based marketplace where users are rewarded for helping to collect that data.

While the financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, the existing StreetCred platform will be shut down as part of the deal.


Source: Tech Crunch

Saildrone launches a 72-foot autonomous seabed-mapping boat

Mapping the ocean’s floor is a surprisingly vital enterprise, which helps with a range of activities including shipping, coastal protection, and deep-sea resource gathering. It’s also a very costly and time-consuming activity, which can be demanding and dangerous for those involved. Saildrone is a startup focused on building out autonomous exploratory vessels that can do lots of mapping, while making very little impact on the environment in which they operate, and without requiring any crew on board at all.

Saildrone’s newest robotic ocean explorer is the Surveyor, its largest vessel at 72-feet long. The Surveyor can spend up to 12 months at a stretch out at sea, and draws its power from wind (hence the large sail-like structure, which is not actually used like the sail on a sailboat) and the sun (via the solar panels dotting its above-water surfaces). Its sensor instrumentation includes sonar that can map down to 7,000 meters (around 22,000 feet). That’s not quite as deep as some of the deepest parts of the world’s oceans, but it’s plenty deep enough to cover the average depth of around 12,100 feet.

As Saildrone notes, we’ve only actually mapped around 20% of the Earth’s oceans to date – meaning we know less about it than we do the surface of Mars or the Moon. Saildrone has already been contributing to better understanding this last great frontier with its 23-foot Explorer model, which has already accumulated 500,000 nautical miles of travel on its autonomous sea voyages. The larger vessel will help not only with seafloor mapping, but also with a new DNA sample collection effort using sensors developed the University of New Hampshire and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, to better understand the genetic makeup of various lifeforms that occupy the water column in more parts of the sea.


Source: Tech Crunch