Ideaforge

A new mobile app called Honk aims to make messaging with friends a more interactive, real-time experience. Instead of sending texts off into the void and hoping for a response, friends on Honk communicate via messages that are shown live as you type, with no saved chat history and no send button. The end result is a feeling of being more present in a conversation, as Honk will notify users the moment someone leaves a chat. And if you really want to get someone’s attention, you can send them a “Honk” — a hard-to-miss notification to join your chat.

If it’s even more urgent, you can even spam the Honk button by pressing it repeatedly. This sends notifications to a friend’s phone if they’re off the app, or a flood of colorful emoji if they have the app open.

After setting up an account by customizing your profile pic, selecting a username and adding friends, you can then tap on a friend’s name in your list to send them a message.

When you enter a chat in Honk, you’ll be presented with two large conversation bubbles. The gray one on the top is where your friend’s messages are shown, while you type in the blue one. (You can change the colors and theme, if you choose.)

As you type, the other person will see the text you’re entering into this box in real-time — including the pauses and typos that would normally be missed. This “live typing” experience is reminiscent of older communication technology, like the early instant messaging app ICQ, or the innovative collaboration tool Google Wave, for example.

In Honk, you’re given 160 characters to type out your thoughts, and this is counted down on the right side of screen below the conversation bubbles. But you don’t tap a “Send” button to share the message — the recipient saw the text as it was entered, after all. Instead, you just tap the double arrow “refresh” button to clear the screen and type something new.

There are also buttons for sending emoji, snapping a photo or accessing photos from your Camera Roll to share in the chat. The emoji here work more like iMessage’s “Send with Echo” screen effect, as you’re not just sending a single emoji when you use this feature — you’re sending several huge emoji that temporarily fill the screen.

You can also optionally assign emoji to any word or phrase within an individual chat, using a “Magic Words” feature that will trigger effects as you type (see above). Plus, you can customize chat themes on a per-conversation basis or turn off notifications from an individual user, if you don’t want to hear from them as much.

None of the conversations are stored and there’s no history to look back on. This is similar to messaging apps like Snapchat or Messenger’s Vanish Mode, for instance. (Honk hasn’t clarified its position on security, however, so proceed with caution before getting into riskier content.)

And, of course, if you need to get someone’s attention, you can tap “Honk” to flood them with notifications.

If this all seems somewhat silly, then you’re probably not the target market for the Honk messaging experience.

The app is clearly aiming for a young crowd of largely teenage users. When Honk asks for your age during setup, in fact, you can select an exact number from the list that appears — unless you’re “old,” that is. The last option on the list of ages is “21+” — the “older folks” age bracket, which may sting a bit for the millennial crowd who often still think of themselves as the online trendsetters.

But Honk is aiming to grab Gen Z’s interest, it seems. It’s even marketing to them on TikTok, where it’s already generated some 140K+ “Likes,” as of the time of writing, despite having only uploaded its first video yesterday. Honk founder Benji Taylor also noted on Twitter the app has seen 550,000 “Honks” sent so far, as of Wednesday, December 23, 2020, shortly after noon Eastern.

@usehonkwait for it ##fyp♬ original sound – Honk

Per its website, Honk is the flagship product from software company and app publisher Los Feliz Engineering (LFE), which is backed by investors including Naval Ravikant, Elad Gil, Brian Norgard, David Tisch, Jeff Fagnan, Ryan Hoover, Sarah Downey, Josh Hannah, Sahil Lavingia and others.

“It’s exceptionally well designed,” said Product Hunt founder and Weekend Fund investor Ryan Hoover, about Honk. “[Honk founder] Benji [Taylor] and team labored over the small details, from the animations to the sounds. They’re also super focused on speed,” he added.

Taylor declined a full interview when TechCrunch reached out, noting the team was focused on building the product for the time being.

“We’ve been working on Honk for a while now. Our goal is to make messaging fun, and empower people to communicate in new, creative ways that take relationships deeper,” Taylor told TechCrunch. “Ultimately though, we’re a small team building this for ourselves and our friends. If other people like it, all the better,” he said.

Honk, we should note, has been struggling under the load of new signups at launch and high usage. Honk users report the app will sometimes say they’re offline when they’re not, for example, among other bugs. Honk acknowledged the issues on its Twitter and says it’s been working to resolve them.

The app is currently a free download on iOS. It does not include in-app purchases or have any obvious business model.

Source: Tech Crunch

You’re probably investing in an email newsletter these days, whether you’re an international brand, a nonprofit, or a local news publisher.

Maybe email is even your focus now, because you got burned by Facebook, Google or other closed platforms during the past decade. The problem is that the tools you have available are probably too generic, or are built specifically for marketers. What if you want to make money from the newsletter content itself?

Letterhead is slicing through the vast market of existing email SaaS products, betting that a cross-section of revenue and collaboration needs are not being met properly for newsletter creators of all types. Instead, it puts all ad sales, paid subscriptions and newsletter content management into a single, streamlined product.

Its viewpoint on the future of newsletters — and its customer base so far — are intriguingly different from your typical SaaS startup in Silicon Valley. And there’s a reason for that. Letterhead is actually a product spinout of a community publisher in Miami called WhereBy.Us that began life in 2014 by launching a local media site, The New Tropic. The publication became a rare success in online local news, once it focused on the email newsletter format.

Image Credits: Letterhead (opens in a new window)

“Initially, our goal was to create a local media product that would help people learn about the city, get more involved and serve a new generation of local news users,” co-founder and CEO Chris Sopher tells me by video chat. “Our ideas had included opening a bar, events, and all kinds of other stuff. We quickly pared that back to the things that were working, and email was at the top of the list.”

Advertising inventory in these emails was in high demand, so the company built out a self-service payment system for advertisers, that allowed its newsletter writers to easily publish the correct ads in the correct place.

With this business model and technology as a foundation, it launched or acquired newsletters in Seattle, Portland, Orlando and Pittsburgh. Through this process, it has continued to improve the tool itself.

It also discovered the broader demand.

“People would reach out to us and say ‘I love this newsletter, what tools do you use?’ because it was such a pain to produce emails with all of the different tools out there,” Sopher explains.

(Those tools, in this author’s experience, generally include a combination of Mailchimp, Constant Contact or Sailthru, together with your main web publishing CMS like WordPress, your separate subscription software like Piano and however you are managing ads.)

“We’d tell people that we used our own internal tools and they’d say ‘oh, can we use those, too? And we’d say ‘no, that’s not what we’re doing.’ Eventually, we said no enough that we looked at each other and said, ‘we should figure out how to get to yes on this.’ And that’s where Letterhead came from.”

Today, Whereby.us is one of the few success stories from a catastrophic decade in local news. Sopher says that its five city newsletters are comfortably profitable via ads overall — having recovered from a pandemic dip earlier this year — and are continuing to grow.

But the new focus is on Letterhead’s tools, including the ad system, a new paid subscription feature that lets you do things like add paywalled subsections of emails, easy-to-use text editing and template formatting, and soon, analytics.

“Sponsorships and ads were [needs] we heard about most, so that’s where we started,” cofounder and COO Rebekah Monson said by email. “The bigger vision is to create a set of tools and services that feed into each other in one easy place, and help all of those revenue streams grow, eventually branching out from email. We’re seeing demand for that not just from traditional media publishers, but also from marketers, nonprofits, universities, professional associations — all these folks who have engaged communities and want to deepen those relationships and bring in revenue through that engagement.”

On the spectrum of email newsletter products, Letterhead’s focus on revenues and team collaboration places it adjacent to Substack’s focus on the individual writer, and to other products like Lede designed specifically around subscription news organizations.

Letterhead is explicitly a hosted software solution that you pay for your organization to use, not an open-source project like Ghost. Like how Shopify provides a suite of white-label ecommerce features for anyone who wants to run an online business, it wants to be the engine humming away under the hood of your newsletter.

On the much broader spectrum of all email solutions in the SaaS world, Letterhead is betting that its understanding of the market and its product design can beat out the brutally competitive world of SaaS email products.

Image Credits: Letterhead (opens in a new window)

Since soft-launching earlier this year, Sopher says it has already been signing up a broad range of customers. Examples he cited include startups (Shoot My Travel), nonprofits (Vida y Salud and Refresh) and political groups (OD Action) as customers, as well as local news publishers, of course (VTDigger, Choose954, and Santa Cruz Local). Letterhead is also a partner in WordPress’ News Pack program, which is a collection of plugins for publishers on that CMS.

“We’re always going to have an affinity to media publishing… but there is a broader need than just that industry,” he explains. “And we’re also seeing this moment where a lot of other organizations are participating in [publishing]. You name a topic, there will be professional reporters out there doing great work. But it’s also pretty likely that there is a brand, an agency, a nonprofit, or some other organization creating interesting and useful content, and building a community around it — that would not raise its hand and say that it is part of the news industry.”

Sopher also notes that the product is designed to be modular, so that companies can just use parts of it and integrate its features with other email service providers and most any tech stack.

“What we’re seeing is that smaller customers are coming on for the simplicity of having it all in one place without sacrificing monetization,” he adds, “but larger customers are choosing us as one part of their stack as they build a multifaceted business or grow out of tools geared more to individual or independent creators.”

With the revenue options in place, Sopher says analytics and additional ESP options are coming next.

Over the course of its history, Whereby.us has raised $5 million from across tech and media. Backers include the Knight Foundation, Jason Calacanis’ LAUNCH fund, Band of Angels, McClatchy, hundreds of smaller investors via Republic and SeedInvest, and most recently a round led by Brick Capital.

Source: Tech Crunch

DeepMind has made it a mission to show that not only can an AI truly become proficient at a game, it can do so without even being told the rules. Its newest AI agent, called MuZero, accomplishes this not just with visually simple games with complex strategies, like Go, Chess, and Shogi, but with visually complex Atari games.

The success of DeepMind’s earlier AIs was at least partly due to a very efficient navigation of the immense decision trees that represent the possible actions in a game. In Go or Chess these trees are governed by very specific rules, like where pieces can move, what happens when this piece does that, and so on.

The AI that beat world champions at Go, AlphaGo, knew these rules and kept them in mind (or perhaps in RAM) while studying games between and against human players, forming a set of best practices and strategies. The sequel, AlphaGo Zero, did this without human data, playing only against itself. AlphaZero did the same with Go, Chess, and Shogi in 2018, creating a single AI model that could play all these games proficiently.

But in all these cases the AI was presented with a set of immutable, known rules for the games, creating a framework around which it could build its strategies. Think about it: if you’re told a pawn can become a queen, you plan for it from the beginning, but if you have to find out, you may develop entirely different strategies.

This helpful diagram shows what different models have achieved with different starting knowledge.

As the company explains in a blog post about their new research, if AIs are told the rules ahead of time, “this makes it difficult to apply them to messy real world problems which are typically complex and hard to distill into simple rules.”

The company’s latest advance, then, is MuZero, which plays not only the aforementioned games but a variety of Atari games, and it does so without being provided with a rulebook at all. The final model learned to play all of these games not just from experimenting on its own (no human data) but without being told even the most basic rules.

Instead of using the rules to find the best-case scenario (because it can’t), MuZero learns to take into account every aspect of the game environment, observing for itself whether it’s important or not. Over millions of games it learns not just the rules, but the general value of a position, general policies for getting ahead, and a way of evaluating its own actions in hindsight.

This latter ability helps it learn from its own mistakes, rewinding and redoing games to try different approaches that further hone the position and policy values.

You may remember Agent57, another DeepMind creation that excelled at a set of 57 Atari games. MuZero takes the best of that AI and combines it with the best of AlphaZero. MuZero differs from the former in that it does not model the entire game environment, but focuses on the parts that affect its decision-making, and from the latter in that it bases its model of the rules purely on its own experimentation and firsthand knowledge.

Understanding the game world lets MuZero effectively plan its actions even when the game world is, like many Atari games, partly randomized and visually complex. That pushes it closer to an AI that can safely and intelligently interact with the real world, learning to understand the world around it without the need to be told every detail (though it’s likely that a few, like “don’t crush humans,” will be etched in stone). As one of the researchers told the BBC, the team is already experimenting with seeing how MuZero could improve video compression — obviously a very different problem than Ms. Pac-Man.

The details of MuZero were published today in the journal Nature.

Source: Tech Crunch

Fluent Forever, a startup that uses a novel learning system to help its users master a new language faster, has raised a $4.9 million funding round led by Denver-based Stout Street Capital. Other investors in this round include The Syndicate, LAUNCH, Mana Ventures, Noveus VC, Flight.VC, Insta VC, UpVentures, Firebrand Ventures, Cultivation Capital, Spero Ventures and Lofty Ventures.

In many ways, Fluent Forever is a direct competitor to Duolingo, Babbel and similar online language learning services. What sets it apart is a focus on a personalized learning system that emphasizes ear training, visual aids and something akin to spaced-repetition for helping you memorize new words and phrases. It’s a paid service (after a 14-day free trial) with subscriptions starting at $10 per month for a monthly subscription and the usual discounts for longer-term commitments.

To teach himself his first languages, the company’s founder and CEO Gabriel Wyner used the popular flashcard service Anki, wrote a book about his approach, and taught workshops on language learning using his system with Anki. But as he noted, Anki is a serious tool, and simply learning how to get the most out of it takes a lot of time and energy.

Image Credits: Fluent Forever

“I’ve watched everyone else fail at language learning,” he told me. “And the first thought is, okay, well, if you just learn how to do it right, then that’s a fixable thing. That’s exciting. And then once you have a solution for people and they’re all excited about it — but then you watch them fail because of IT reasons. That’s extra frustrating.”

In many ways then, Fluent Forever uses Wyner’s flashcard approach — because building those flashcards by hand is at the core of his learning system — and turns it into a far-easier-to-use application.

What people want, Wyner acknowledged, is a tool where you just press some buttons and learn something. But that doesn’t work. “I had to have a really strong reaction to this — a really strong answer — and say, ‘absolutely not. That is the one thing that teaches you is building it.’ ”

Wyner is not afraid to compare his approach to Duolingo’s and argues that its focus on translation exercises doesn’t translate to real language skills in the long run. At the same time, he freely acknowledges that the Duolingo user experience and gamification are far better than Fluent Forever. But he also believes that learners see far better results with his system.

Image Credits: Fluent Forever

“We ask [our users]: ‘Why are you with us? Why would you pay for us when you could just get Duolingo for free?” What they come back with is, ‘yeah, your product is rough around the edges. I wish you would fix this, this and that, but you had me thinking in Spanish in two weeks,” Wyner said.

Fluent Forever currently supports nine languages: Japanese, French, Russian, Mexican and Spanish Spanish, Italian, Korean, German and Brazilian Portuguese, with Dutch being the next language the team is tackling.

As Wyner told me, the company had trouble raising in 2019, in part because the service was seeing pretty flat growth at the time. “People are very skeptical about language learning — that is not a sexy field. People don’t like it. The idea of jumping and trying to be competitive with Duolingo was just not appealing to anyone,” he told me. Come 2020, though, growth picked up, even before the COVID pandemic. At the same time, Fluent Forever also participated in Jason Calacanis’ Launch Accelerator.

Looking ahead, Wyner tells me that Fluent Forever is looking at ways to bring live tutors into the loop. Live tutoring online has been done before, of course, and there are some companies like Preply that specialize in it already, but what Fluent Forever wants to do is combine the online language learning service with short live sessions and then use the online component to go back to that conversation over the course of a week or so. One advantage here is that these users — who will likely pay a premium for the live service — will also use their time with live tutors to create their own personalized sentences in the Fluent Forever system, which could then over time become content that’s available to all users, too.

Source: Tech Crunch

Even in a non-hell year, running a successful startup is a tremendous lift. After the events of 2020, however, no doubt many already lean businesses are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. For every company that saw increased interest in their offerings during the pandemic, there were several that simply couldn’t make it through the finish line.

We’ve put this list together for several years now. It’s not a fun task, but it seems worthwhile to commemorate the startups that have closed up shop over the past 12 months. (Some of them were acquired by larger companies before shutting down, but all of them began their life as startups, and it still felt worthwhile to mark the end of their stories.) It also offers an opportunity to examine those issues from a bit of distance to see if there are any broader takeaways for the community at large.

This year’s list is among the most diverse we’ve done, ranging from standard smaller-name closures to big blockbuster crashes like Quibi and Essential . For some, the pandemic was the final nail in the coffin, but in many cases, cracks in business models were already starting to surface well before COVID-19 ground the global economy to a screeching halt.

Atrium (2017-2020)

Total Raised: $75 million

Atrium, a 100-person legal tech startup founded by Justin Kan, shut down in March after failing to find an efficient way to replace the arduous systems of law firms. The startup even returned some of its $75.5 million in funding to its investors, including Andreessen Horowitz.

The shutdown comes after the platform had pivoted just months earlier, laying off in-house lawyers and turning into a clearer SaaS play. Ultimately, Atrium’s failure shows how difficult and unprofitable it could be to disrupt a traditional and complicated system.

The closure came just three years after it launched with the goal to build software for startups to navigate fundraising, hiring, acquisition deals and collaboration with their legal team.

Essential (2017-2020)

Total Raised: $330 million

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington

Big plans, big names and a boatload of money should have been enough to buy Essential a lengthy runway. Sure, Essential was entering a mature and oversaturated market, but the Playground-backed startup was doing so with $330 million in funding, a team of top industry executives and some genuinely innovative ideas.

When I spoke to the company at launch, an executive outlined a 10-year plan to become a major player in both the mobile and smart home categories. Ultimately, the company was able to eke out just under three years of life after coming out of stealth. And while it did give the world a promising handset, its connected home hub never arrived.

Timing, broader marketing issues and troubling allegations of sexual misconduct were all contributing factors that stopped Essential’s big plans dead in their tracks.

HubHaus (2016-2020)

Total Raised: $11.4 million

Image Credits: HubHaus

HubHaus, founded by Shruti Merchant, was a long-term housing rental platform rooted in the belief that adult dormitories would take off. The startup targeted working professionals in cities, and raised only around $11 million in known venture capital. When it came to raising a Series B, Merchant says the company struggled to close and lost investor interest due to WeWork’s failed IPO.

After then pivoting to a self-funded company, HubHaus was just finding footing when the coronavirus pandemic arrived in the United States, drastically hurting the rental market (as shown by Airbnb’s public struggles, as well). The housing company eventually decided to close down in September, leaving landlords, members and vendors in limbo and bringing on a fresh sweep of critique and controversy.

Affordable housing continues to be an issue in the Bay Area, and HubHaus’s departure from the scene underscores this truth.

Hipmunk (2010-2020)

Total Raised: $55 million

Image Credits: Hipmunk

Hipmunk, founded by Adam J. Goldstein and Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, was one of the first travel aggregation platforms on the market. The company put together information on flights, hotels and car rental all into one place so consumers could compare and contrast prices with ease.

The focus was enough for the platform to get acquired by Concur, but now after four years, the travel startup shut down. Notably, the travel startup’s closure wasn’t necessarily tied to the coronavirus pandemic. The site officially went dark on January 23, months before lockdowns came to the United States.

IfOnly (2012-2020)

Total Raised: $51.4 million

Photo: Thomas Barwick/Getty Images

IfOnly had created a marketplaces of exclusive events — such as “goat yoga” — a business that faced obvious challenges during the pandemic. The startup was actually acquired by one of its investors, Mastercard, late last year, but the acquisition wasn’t announced until IfOnly revealed over the summer that it was shutting down.

Mastercard also said IfOnly’s team and technology are still part of its Priceless experience marketplace: “The IfOnly platform will continue to help advance our Priceless strategy and our combined team will be even better positioned and equipped to deliver exclusive experiences for cardholders globally.”

Mixer/Beam Interactive (2014-2020)

Total Raised: $520,000

Image Credits: Microsoft

Microsoft shut down its Twitch competitor Mixer this year, handing off its partnerships to Facebook Gaming. The service had its roots in the software giant’s acquisition of Beam Interactive shortly after the startup won TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield in 2016.

Before giving up, Microsoft made some big investments in Mixer’s success, most notably signing streaming superstars Ninja and Shroud to exclusive deals. (They became free agents after the shutdown.) However, Microsoft’s gaming chief Phil Spencer said the company suffered from starting out “pretty far behind” the biggest players in the streaming market.

The Outline (2016-2020)

Total Raised: $10.2 million

Image Credits: The Outline

Despite a busy year of innovation and venture for news media platforms, The Outline, which branded itself as “the next generation version of the New Yorker” was shut down. The media site was started by Josh Topolsky and had an explicit focus on serving millennials with a digital-first news media brand.

The shutdown was part of a broader layoffs at Bustle Digital Group, which acquired the publication in 2019. Pre-acquisition, The Outline had already scaled back its editorial staff and refocused on freelance articles. (Input — a tech site that Topolsky founded for BDG — continues to publish.)

Periscope (2015-2020)

Periscope went out with more of a whimper than a bang. The startup was acquired by Twitter before it had even launched a product. With Meerkat bursting on the scene that year at SXSW, Twitter went on the offensive, buying the startup to build out its own live video offering.

Periscope’s run was decent as far as these things go, and its technology will live on as part of Twitter’s video offerings, even after the app is officially discontinued next March. But in the end, Periscope was a shell of its former self. In fact, this is a rare instance where the pandemic may have actually delayed its shutdown.

The company notes, “We probably would have made this decision sooner if it weren’t for all of the projects we reprioritized due to the events of 2020.”

PicoBrew (2010-2020)

Total Raised: $15.1 million

Image Credits: PicoBrew

The company made beer-brewing machines that used coffee pod-style PicoPaks, then expanded into other categories like coffee and tea, but never quite attracted enough customers to make the business viable. It sold its assets earlier this year to PB Funding Group — a group of lenders recruited by then-CEO Bill Mitchell in 2018 to keep it afloat.

It’s possible that PicoBrew will live on in some form, as PB Funding Group says it’s seeking buyers for the company’s patents and other intellectual property, and that it will keep the website running in the short term so that the machines don’t stop working.

Quibi (2018-2020)

Total Raised: $1.75 billion

Quibi CEO Meg Whitman speaks about the short-form video streaming service for mobile Quibi during a keynote address January 8, 2020 at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)

More so than any tech company in recent memory (with the possible exception of Theranos), Quibi’s existence feels like a fever dream. $1.75 billion in funding later and what do we have to show for it? “Fierce Queens,” a nature documentary about female animals. The HGTV-style program, “Murder House Flip.” And, of course, “The Shape of Pasta.” A show about pasta.

Early reports of the service’s demise seemed premature — if only because there was seemingly no way a company could burn through that much capital that quickly. By late-October, however, it was over. “All that is left now is to offer a profound apology for disappointing you and, ultimately, for letting you down,” founders Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman wrote in an open letter.

Sometimes startup failures are bad timing. Sometimes it’s just plain bad luck. With Quibi, the diagnoses of what went wrong can be summed up in one word: everything.

Rubica (2016-2020)

Total Raised: $15 million

Image Credits: Rubica

Rubica spun out of security company Concentric Advisors with the aim of offering tools that were more advanced than antivirus software, while still remaining accessible to individuals and small businesses. CEO and co-founder Frances Dewing said that when customers cut back on spending during the pandemic, the company tried to shift its focus to larger enterprise, but it failed to convince investors there was a business there.

“We were all really surprised given how relevant and needed this is right now,” she said. “Investors didn’t agree with that or see it in the same way.”

ScaleFactor (2014-2020)

Total Raised: $104 million

Businessman’s hands with calculator and cost at the office and Financial data analyzing counting on wood desk. Image Credits: Sarinya Pinngam/EyeEm / Getty Images

ScaleFactor was a startup claiming to offer artificial intelligence tools that could replace accountants for small businesses; it blamed the pandemic for cutting its revenue in half and forcing the company to shut down. However, former employees and customers told Forbes a different story — that ScaleFactor actually relied on human accountants (including an outsourced team in the Philippines) to do the work.

While it’s hardly unprecedented for a startup to fudge the truth about their level of automation versus human labor, this reportedly resulted in error-filled accounting for ScaleFactor clients. (Responding to a fact-checking email, former CEO Kurt Rathmann said the email was “filled with numerous factual inaccuracies and misrepresentation” and declined to comment further.)

Starsky Robotics (2015-2020)

Total Raised: $20 million

Self-driving trucks startup Starksy Robotics began with this first, and problematic truck. Image Credits: Starsky Robotics

“In 2019, our truck became the first fully-unmanned truck to drive on a live highway,” Starsky Robotics co-founder and CEO Stefan Seltz-Axmacher wrote in a Medium post in March. “And in 2020, we’re shutting down.” After five years and $20 million in funding, the autonomous trucking company shut its doors that month. It wasn’t for lack of ambition or demand — it seems safe to assume there’s still a bright future for self-driving trucks.

Ultimately, however, Starsky won’t be along for that ride — a fact Seltz-Axmacher blames largely on timing. A crowded market is certainly at play, as well, with countless companies currently pushing to bring autonomous technology to the road.

Stockwell/Bodega (2018-2020)

Total Raised: $10 million

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Founded in 2018 by ex-Googlers, Stockwell AI shut down after being unable to find business for its in-building smart vending machines that stocked everything from condoms to La Croix. The company blamed the “current landscape” (also known as the global pandemic we are experiencing) for its closure.

Stockwell AI, formerly known as Bodega, was well-funded and well-known, with more than $45 million in funding from investors that included NEA, GV, DCM Ventures, Forerunner, First Round and Homebrew. Still, even venture capital couldn’t make vending machines work well enough.

Trover (2011-2020)

Total Raised: $2.5 million

Image Credits: Trover

Another travel-focused startup bites the dust as the coronavirus limits the chance to safely explore the world (let alone your neighborhood). Trover, a photo-sharing hub for travelers acquired by Expedia, shut down in August. The startup was founded by Rich Barton and Jason Karas and was meant to connect people travelling to the same places. The startup had quite the life: it began out of the remains of TravelPost, a travel review site, and got scooped up by its parent company when it only had $2.5 million in funding. Unfortunately, its nine-year journey is over for now.

Source: Tech Crunch