Ideaforge

COVID-19 knocked the wheels off the economy, but one nascent tech job not only kept rolling, it picked up speed.

Teleoperations — or more specifically, teleops for autonomous delivery robots — is still a niche job within an industry that has yet to dive into the deep end of the commercialization pool. However, the job, in which a human remotely monitors and guides autonomous robots, has seen growth along with rising demand for contactless delivery over the past several months.

And it appears that COVID-19 inadvertently expanded the labor pool — at least for Postmates.

On-demand delivery startup Postmates partnered last year with Phantom Auto, an autonomous vehicle teleoperations company. Postmates uses Phantom Auto’s software development kit to remotely monitor, guide or operate its fleet of cooler-inspired autonomous delivery robots known as Serve.

The partnership is part of Phantom Auto’s efforts to diversify beyond autonomous robotaxi applications to a logistics business targeting sidewalks, warehouses and cargo yards — all the places where autonomy and teleoperation are being deployed today.

Momentum for delivery robots

The so-called “race” to deploy self-driving trucks, robotaxi services and other applications of autonomous vehicle technology on public roads had slowed long before COVID-19 appeared. Deployment timelines moved as engineers dug into the harder-than-expected challenges of validating and verifying that their self-driving vehicle technology was safe enough to operate without a human operator behind the wheel. The smaller less capitalized startups have tried to pivot, some unsuccessfully.

COVID-19 has slowed development even further with one exception: autonomous delivery robots that operate on sidewalks or in bike lanes — not roads. Startups like Refraction AI, Starship Technologies and Postmates have experienced an uptick in demand as COVID-19 prompted cities, counties and states to issue stay-at-home orders. Autonomous robots, once considered novelties, have become accepted and even sought after. For instance, Nuro’s R2 delivery robots are being used to move medical supplies around two stadiums in California that were converted into COVID-19 treatment centers.

A Postmates employee monitors one of the company’s autonomous delivery robots. Photo: Postmates

As COVID-19 swept into the U.S., Postmates executives came to the conclusion that this was going to be a long ordeal. The company had already sent its engineering staff to work from home, but its teleoperators were still in coming to the company’s operations centers.

By mid-March, stay-at-home orders began in San Francisco and Los Angeles — the two markets where Postmates operates its autonomous delivery bots. Soon after, Postmates made its move and turned teleoperators, or fleet supervisors as they call them, into a work-from-home job.

“We had this recognition that this isn’t really going to be a two or three-week phase,” Ali Kashani, Postmates’ vice president of special projects said in a recent interview. “We realized that we have a role to play here — we can actually do something.”

Postmates decided to ramp up the deployment of its Serve robots, which would require more teleoperations workers. These autonomous robot guides are needed to make sure the Serve bots make it safely to and from their destination.

Using Phantom Auto’s software, a Postmates fleet supervisor can monitor a robot from thousands of miles away. The supervisor will jump in to help the bot navigate the first and last 15 feet to a restaurant or the recipient or if it needs help crossing a busy street.

These robot guides can assist using a couple of methods. The human teleoperator can provide input to the system, something as simple as a thumbs up or thumbs down to help the bot make the right choice. The employee can also use a hand-held remote controller to steer, accelerate and slow down the bot in real-time.

Instead of cramming people into its operations centers, Postmates took the tech to employees’ homes. The company, along with an assist from Phantom Auto, set up at-home workstations, upgraded their internet and developed new standard operating procedures to ensure that managers could monitor their connectivity more effectively.

Postmates had its fleet supervisors working from home a few days after the first shelter-in-place orders kicked off in mid-March, Kashani said.

That seemingly obvious move might never happened had it not been for COVID-19. Under normal operating procedures, fleet supervisors worked in Postmates’ centralized operation center facilities in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

When it moved the job to employees’ homes, Postmates discovered it had a much larger labor pool to pull from. Postmates can now employ workers who live far from its offices or people with disabilities who might have difficulty traveling from home.

The company has increased its fleet supervisors by 30% since San Francisco issued its shelter-in-place order March 17. Postmates wouldn’t share exact employee numbers.

Kashani said demand for robot deliveries was never the problem. “The limitations in this kind of business is just how many robots can you build and deploy?” Kashani said. And the more robots that are deployed, the more fleet supervisors are needed.

Source: Tech Crunch

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday in your inbox.

Hi and welcome back to The Station, I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch. If you’re interested in all the future and present ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B, you’re in the right place.

It felt like Tesla dominated the news cycle once again this week. (Checks list of published articles) And yep, it sure did. There was other mobility news though, including layoffs at self-driving company Cruise and new rules that Uber is rolling out Monday that will change the ride-hailing experience for the foreseeable future.

Reach out and email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, offer up opinions or tips. You can also send a direct message to me at Twitter — @kirstenkorosec.

Shall we get down to it? Vamos.

Micromobbin’

The micromobbin’ space got more crowded this week as Bolt announced it would launch an electric scooter service in more than 45 cities this summer. Bolt, a big competitor to Uber in Europe and Africa, has raised more than $200 million from investors like Daimler and Didi Chuxing.

Meanwhile, Bird, Lime, Voi and Tier are reportedly in talks with local authorities in the U.K. to launch electric scooter trials as early as next month. The U.K. originally planned to start allowing companies to operate next year, but that timeline has been pushed up amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Over in the land of e-bikes … The National Park Service has proposed revisions to rules regarding e-bike use on federal lands. The proposal is open for public comment until June 8, 2020.

The proposed regulations, which you should check out here, would exclude e-bikes from the definition of motor vehicle. Park superintendents would have the authority to open up paths and roads designated for bicycles to e-bikes.

There are conditions. Ultimately, the authority will rest with that particular superintendent, which means this is not an e-bike free-for-all in national parks. E-bike riders will have to pedal — no throttle only — in non-motorized areas and they would still be prohibited in designated wilderness areas.

PeopleForBikes, a non-profit organization and bicycle advocacy group, has loads more information on the proposed rulemaking.

Speaking of e-bikes, these modes of transportation are poised to be big winners this year. We’ve highlighted some of the companies that have already seen gains since the  COVID-19 pandemic. This week, a pair of stories provide some insight into this trend. Bloomberg focused on Specialized Bike Components Inc and The Verge did a deep dive into the broader e-bikes industry. One snippet from The Verge article gives you some idea of how things are shaping up for e-bike companies: Seattle-based Rad Power Bikes said its sales in April increased a whopping 297% year over year; its sales to business customers in the delivery sector also rose 191% from March to April this year.

It’s not e-bike boom times for everyone though. The Verge reported that GM killed off its first electric bike called ARIV.

 — Megan Rose Dickey and Kirsten Korosec

Deal of the week

Deals — they are slim, but they’re still happenin’.

It seems like just yesterday that Waymo announced it had raised $2.25 billion — its first external investment — in a round led by Silver Lake, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Mubadala Investment Company. Magna, Andreessen Horowitz and AutoNation and its parent company Alphabet also participated.

But what’s this? A mere two months later Waymo is back. The autonomous vehicle company said it has added another $750 million to the round, bringing the total size of the financing to $3 billion. The extension comes from new investors, including those managed by T. Rowe Price, Perry Creek Capital, Fidelity Management and Research Company and others. Side note: T. Rowe Price is also a major backer of rival Cruise.

Other deals:

Uber approached Grubhub in February with an all-stock takeover offer and the companies have been in talks since then, according to the WSJ, which broke the story. Grubhub proposed Uber pay 2.15 of its shares for each Grubhub share. Uber didn’t bite and now discussions are aimed at a lower price.

TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm unpacks the deal in terms of its cost and explains why Uber has to pay in stock, how large a combined Uber Eats/Grubhub entity would be compared to its competition and why adjusted EBITDA helps us understand how this acquisition could give Uber’s bottom line a shot in the arm.

Intel announced its latest tranche of deals: $132 million invested in 11 startups. The deals speak to some of the company’s most strategic priorities currently and covers artificial intelligence, autonomous computing and chip design.

DispatchTrack, which created a platform for last-mile deliveries to help companies mimic Amazon-like experiences by planning and tracking deliveries more easily, has closed a $144 million investment from a single investor. This is the company’s first-ever funding after scaling up as a bootstrapped startup to support more than 60 million deliveries per year.

VanMoof, the Dutch e-bike startup that launched in 2009, raised $13.5 million from London VC Balderton Capital and SINBON Electronics, the Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer that is its bike assembly partner.

Haulin’

If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it’s how complex and sensitive our supply chain is. Startups going after this sector, whether it’s in subcategories like freight, autonomous robots or logistics, might find a more welcoming investor community.

I’ll be rounding up news and tips in this category when there is news to share. This week, there was.

The United States Postal Service pushed back the deadline for official bids to make its next-generation mail truck due to COVID-19, Trucks.com reported.

Curri, an on-demand construction materials delivery service co-founded by Matt Lafferty and Brian Gonzalez, has started to offer its services in all 50 states. The company, which graduated from Y Combinator’s demo day about a year ago, says its service saves customers roughly half the cost of deploying an in-house fleet for delivery.

Freight mobility company Einride struck a partnership with Oatly to help the plant-based oat drink company transition to electric delivery trucks. The partnership will kick off in the fourth quarter of 2020 in Sweden, where both companies are based.

Layoffs and people news

Cruise car in Hayes Valley, San Francisco.

Just when I think layoffs are slowing, another round of announcements or tips about cuts head my way. Amid the furloughs and layoffs, there has also been some executive reshuffling.

A few layoffs and executive moves stood out this week, namely cuts at Cruise and Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s decision to put the head of paint operations in charge of all production at the company’s factory in Fremont, California.

Let’s dig in.

On the same day that Musk defied local regulations and said he would reopen Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, the CEO put a new person in charge of production.

Musk named Richard Miller, who was director of paint operations at Tesla, to head production at the factory, according to an internal email sent to employees and viewed by TechCrunch. It appears that Miller replaces Jatinder Dhillon, who was the company’s manufacturing director. CNBC had reported in March that Dhillon had left the company, although his LinkedIn profile still shows he is at the company and in the same role.

The email reads, “Due to excellent performance as head of paint operations in Fremont, Richard Miller is hereby promoted to overall head of Fremont Production. Congratulations!”

The timing of this, and who he picked, matters here and suggests that the reopening is more chaotic and disorganized than Musk or Tesla would want folks to believe.

Meanwhile, I got my hands on the memo sent by Cruise CEO Dan Ammann that informed staff of cuts and realignment of resources. (Bloomberg was the first to report the cuts.)

The company said it’s cutting nearly 8% of its more than 1,800-member workforce to reduce costs. The layoffs will affect employees in Cruise’s product, marketing and rideshare business units, according to the memo.

The official statement might rub those who were let go the wrong way. It reads: “In this time of great change, we’re fortunate to have a crystal clear mission and billions in the bank. The actions we took today reflect us doubling down on our engineering work and engineering talent.”

The cuts are notable. But so is the decision by the company to close its Pasadena office, which housed its lidar team. Cruise acquired in 2017 a lidar startup based in Pasadena called Strobe. According to the memo and one source, the lidar team is being folded into its San Francisco operations.

Other moves:

Zomato, an India-headquartered food delivery startup, cut 13% of its workforce and reduced pay for remaining employees. The 11-year-old firm didn’t disclose the exact number of people it was letting go, but the number is above 500.

Fair, the car subscription startup backed by hundreds of millions of dollars from SoftBank and others, has a new CEO. The company announced that Bradley Stewart, who had been CEO of aviation startup XOJet from 2013 to 2018 (when it was acquired by Vista Global), will now lead the company. Stewart confirmed in an interview that Fair is working on raising another round of funding that will include both equity and debt to push ahead on its business now focused squarely on car subscriptions for consumers.

Moto moto

As Harley-Davidson rounds year one on its electric debut, we’re still riding in the fog on how to evaluate the company’s EV pivot, according to TechCrunch reporter Jake Bright.

The American symbol of gas, chrome and steel released its first production electric motorcycle, the LiveWire, in September 2019, but still hasn’t offered sales data. Instead of posting a separate line for EV purchases in its 2019 and 2020 financial reporting, Harley folded LiveWire units sold into its “Cruiser” sales stats, that include some 16 different motorcycle models.

HD’s electric debut received mostly positive reviews from motorcycle stalwarts, but without sales data it’s difficult to evaluate the company’s shift to electric.
The LiveWire is supposed to lead a future line-up of EVs planned by Harley-Davidson — spanning motorcycles, bicycles and scooters.

The company saw a decline in sales and continued losses in its first quarter financials, but “remains committed to advancing our efforts in electric,” HD’s new CEO, Jochen Zeitz, said.

Another component to grading Harley Davidson’s foray into electric is seeing the follow on products to the $29K LiveWire, which was priced too high for the millennial market.
“The company needs to release EV-specific sales data and tell us what’s next in its voltage-powered lineup,” Bright wrote in this feature on Harley Davidson’s electric ambitions and the e-motorcycle market.

Notable reads and other tidbits

Here’s some other stuff that got my attention.

Of course, I’ll kick it off this must-read list with a survey we conducted with seven venture capitalists, including Ernestine Fu of Alsop Louie Partners, Stonly Baptiste & Shaun Abrahamson from Urban.us, Rob Coneybeer with Shasta Ventures, Shahin Farshchi of Lux Capital, Kate Schox with Trucks VC and Jeff Peters from Autotech Ventures.

We asked these VCs their thoughts and advice for mobility startups in this COVDI-19 era.

New York City celebrated its longest stretch of days without a pedestrian death in decades, The Hill reported.

Greentech Media interviewed McDonald’s former global product director, James Wehner, about his plans to shake up EV charging in his new role as chief technology officer at Engenie, the U.K.-based charging specialist.

Self-driving vehicle startup Aurora released a blog post explaining its process for rapidly converting on-road events into virtual tests.

Tesla plans to unveil new advanced battery technology it has developed that can produce power sources for its EVs which last for “millions of miles” and can be produced at low costs, Reuters reported.

Argo AI, the autonomous vehicle technology startup backed by Ford and Volkswagen, has developed a return-to-the road playbook. The guide lays out a detailed plan on how it will resume AV testing while keeping its employees safe.

Source: Tech Crunch

Editor’s note: Get this weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT), just subscribe here.

Commercial real estate, the traditional heart of most cities, may have lost its reason to exist in the last few months. The world is about to find out what the situation is as more locations start to reopen.

First up in our ongoing coverage of the topic, Connie Loizos caught up with a couple proptech investors this week for TechCrunch, who saw existing trends accelerating — with many medically focused additions.

Brendan Wallace of Fifth Wall is looking for more aggressive pickup of smart tech in general, along the lines of what you already see in some other countries. “He notes sensors that can determine how many people are in a room or pass through a turnstile. He points to facial recognition tech that can help keep points of physical contact to a minimum. He imagines that more companies might embrace robots to patrol buildings and, possibly, to clean them, too.”

Darren Bechtel of Brick and Mortar saw tech remaking the construction site, with growing practices like using large-scale pre-fabricated components: “If you’re limited by how many people can work in the field, and you have to put in controls for people not working on top of each other, the question becomes: how can you do the work in a more controlled environment, with a next-gen HVAC system [to purify the air] and markings on the floor?…. People are now saying, ‘How much can we prepare off-site?’”

Buildings are also going to be focused on health features, Connie wrote. “[B]oth Wallace and Bechtel mentioned advanced air purifiers and air handling units used to recondition and circulate air as part of a heating, ventilating and air-conditioning plan. Both say it will likely become a growing area of interest for building owners and developers.”

What about beyond the buildings? A few writers here put together some thoughts in a post for Extra Crunch. Here’s Danny Crichton’s view from Brooklyn:

Few of us can live in the dreary confines of a suburban enclave our entire workweek. And so I expect to see a revitalization of the classic Main Street clusters that once dotted towns across America as people appreciate the close proximity of amenities that they need throughout their day and remote work makes it possible to skip the commute to the central business district.

It’s not going to be a simple transition, of course. The built environment alone will probably take decades to fully transition. But the spirit of Jane Jacobs lives on and will move beyond the downtown core neighborhoods she observed to spread to medium and perhaps even small towns across the country and throughout the world.

If you want more on the topic, check out our recent investor survey with six other top proptech investors from late March (for subscribers).

Just want to settle down at home and get to work? Check out Darrell Etherington’s TechCrunch guide to setting up a pro-grade videoconference studio.

The $100M ARR club continues to grow, despite everything

When Alex Wilhelm rejoined TechCrunch late last year, he kicked things off with a list of companies that he called “the $100M ARR club” to signify unicorns that were also generating a lot of revenue. It was a clever way of organizing which of the hundreds of highly valued companies heading towards IPOs were most set up for success, and our readers agreed.

But, with entire market categories whipsawed by the pandemic, it has been hard to find companies willing to share numbers lately. He still found a few, as he wrote up for Extra Crunch this week: ActiveCampaign, Recorded Future and ON24. Here’s a vignette from the CEO of ActiveCampaign:

While we had the CEO’s attention, TechCrunch wanted to know if ActiveCampaign was taking incoming fire from COVID-19 and its related economic and labor disruptions. As some other SMB-focused software companies have told us, the answer is no. Here’s [Jason] VandeBoom:

We anticipate continued growth in 2020 and are already seeing further acceleration to support this. The past four months have been the best in company history and we’ve seen monthly trials double in that timeframe and new customer acquisition numbers at 4500, 5500, 6000 and 7000 respectively from January to April.

He did hedge those results a little, adding that while his firm has “seen some acceleration from COVID-19 and the digital transformation that it is inspiring,” the CEO is more convinced that “the need for customer experience is what is fueling the majority of this growth.”

This week in China trade news….

The already basic trade agreement between the Trump administration and the Chinese government from last year looks ready to blow up; the administration banned selling more tech to Huawei; TSMC plans to open a factory in Arizona following urging from the US government; Foxconn profits crashed… Danny Crichton has a clear takeaway on TechCrunch for startups about the latest headlines:

[T]he world of semiconductors, of internet infrastructure, of the tech ties that have bound the U.S. and China together for decades — they are frayed and are almost gone. It’s a new era in supply chains and trade, and an open world for new approaches to these huge existing industries.

If your company is not already planning for a more chaotic, multi-polar world than what most of us can remember living through, it may already be too late.

(Photo by CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT/AFP via Getty Images)

Investor survey: hospitals to increase tech focus after pandemic

Sarah Buhr talked to top investors in the healthcare B2B and infrastructure businesses for one of our investor surveys this week on Extra Crunch. They generally seemed to agree that the pandemic was going to push the system wholesale towards better technology. Here’s Bilal Zuberi of Lux Capital:

While a lot of our healthcare infrastructure will take a little bit of time recovering from the stress COVID placed on it, we anticipate this to provide a push to the system to adopt new technologies that enable distributed health, build resiliency in our delivery networks and deploy data-enabled healthcare. Hospital balance sheets might struggle in the short term to buy new technologies, but payers as well as large businesses might participate in infrastructure development and deployment in a bigger way. We anticipate selling to hospitals to be difficult in the short term, as they try to recover from the revenue shortfall they experienced during COVID-19, but will generally emerge more interested in adopting new technologies, digital and remote health solutions and automation in various functions. Needless to say, a wide-scale digital transformation of our healthcare industry is underway, and there is no looking back.

Don’t miss our other survey this week, on how the mobility investors are viewing the pandemic.

Protecting your equity as a startup employee

Wouter Witvoet of fintech startup SecFi wrote a guest post for TechCrunch going over some key points for anyone working at a startup right now (or recently). As an occasional startup founder and/or employee myself, I’d like to recommend this one for special consideration: “Negotiate for equity during a pay cut or furlough.”

Startups typically offer equity as a means of deferred compensation and as a way to incentivize employees to own a piece of the company they are building. The compensation is deferred as most startups are cash-strapped and cannot afford to pay you what a larger company may be able to.

If your company is now asking you to take a pay cut, or even take no pay during this time, you should consider asking for additional equity to make up for the lost compensation. While not all companies may be amenable to offering more equity, there is no cash outlay from the company’s standpoint, so it’s an efficient way for your company to compensate you for your sacrifice while preserving their cash.

In addition, offering more equity shows a commitment from management to their employees during this difficult time. It may be the win-win scenario for your company and yourself in the long-run so it’s worth having the conversation with management to discuss if this is available for you.

At first it seems weird when you consider typical venture dynamics. The founders have probably already lost leverage against the company’s investors. These investors have probably already lost leverage against their LPs. So nobody is naturally included to give up even more. And the employees were already last in line on the cap table and first to go, so why should founders do anything different?

Tactically, the best employees will be attracted go work at bigger more stable companies as the pandemic recession stretches on — and you might not have the cash to afford the effort to rehire. Strategically, now is the time to build the esprit de corp that will carry your company forward into better times… a few extra basis points for the team now could help deliver a priceless return.  

Across the week

TechCrunch

COVID-19 shows we need Universal Basic Internet now

AngelList wants to improve comparing VC fund performance with new metrics and calculator

Seven viral futures

Where to shop online that isn’t Amazon, Target or Walmart

Extra Crunch

4 edtech CEOs peer into the industry’s future

Sequoia’s Roelof Botha is more optimistic about startups today than he was a year ago

These best practices maximize the value of your online events

Fintech startups amass war chests for the economic downturn

Around TechCrunch

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Extra Crunch Live: Join Revolution’s Steve Case and Clara Sieg on May 21 at 3pm ET/12pm PT

#EquityPod

From Alex:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Are you a regular Equity listener? Take our survey here! We talk about it on the show.

From home once again this week, Danny, Natasha, Alex and Chris got together to pull the show together. But unlike last week’s episode (catch up here if you are behind), this week’s show features a game that actually worked. It’s at the end, as you’ll see.

But before that piece of the puzzle, there was a bunch of news to go over. We had to leave SaaS valuations, the Liftoff List, Brex and FalconX on the floor, but there was still so much good stuff to cover:

• Slice raised $43 million from KKR, making us all rather hungry — and curious. Where does Slice fit into the food-delivery market, and does its restaurant-friendly model give it enough room to grow revenue so that its new valuation makes sense?
• The Uber Eats-Grubhub deal was an unavoidable topic this week, given that it has the chance to remake the food delivery landscape. What room would be left in the market for Postmates? And would it pass regulatory scrutiny? We’re curious.
• Sticking to the on-demand theme, Instacart has grown bonkers-quick in the last few months, even making some money in the process. We’re impressed.
• It’s not the only thing out there growing like hell — Shopify is also putting up insane numbers, as reflected in its share price. TechCrunch took a look back through its history the other day.
• The secondary markets saw some consolidation this week, which brought back some fond memories.
• Quizlet raised $30 million at a $1 billion valuation, causing some consternation among the hosts. And Vise raised a more modest $14.5 million in a round that Danny covered.

Then we played our game. Please hold us to account. And if you have listened to the show for a while, take our survey! It’s right after this next sentence.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

Source: Tech Crunch