Ideaforge

Sensor data platform Samsara confirmed this morning that it had closed a new round of funding from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst that values the startup at $3.6 billion.

The news was first reported by Cheddar, which spotted a filing with the state of Delaware on December 21 disclosing Samsara’s intent to raise a $100 million round at more than double the valuation it garnered upon its $50 million Series D this March.

“Our growth comes from bringing transformational new technologies to solve the problems of operational businesses, a massive segment of the economy that has long been underserved by the technology industry,” wrote Kiren Sekar, Samsara’s vice president of marketing and products, in the funding announcement. “Today, the advent of inexpensive sensors, high-bandwidth wireless connectivity, smartphones, and cloud computing enable these businesses to fully reap the benefits of 21st century technology.”

Founded in 2015, Samsara supports the transportation, logistics, construction, food production, energy and manufacturing industries with its internet-connected sensor systems, which helps businesses collect data and derive insights to improve the efficiency of physical operations.

The company’s co-founders are Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket, who previously launched Meraki, an enterprise Wi-Fi startup acquired by Cisco in an all-cash $1.2 billion deal in 2012.

Samsara’s latest financing brings the company’s total raised to $230 million. According to PitchBook, Andreessen Howoritz and General Catalyst are the only two private investors in the company, with Marc Andreessen and Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst representing the venture capital firms as lead investors on several Samsara deals.

San Francisco-based Samsara says revenue grew 250 percent in 2018 as its customer base swelled to 5,000. As for how it will deploy the new capital, the company plans to hire 1,000 employees, double down on AI and computer vision technology and open its first East Coast office in Atlanta.

The startup has yet to spend a dime of its last financing round, evidence it, like many other venture-funded startups, is pulling in capital before a market downturn strikes the industry and makes it increasingly difficult to raise hefty sums at impressive valuations.

“While the company already had a healthy balance sheet – we hadn’t dipped into our previous round of funding – the new capital enables us to accelerate long-term product investments and expand into new markets while continuing to maintain a strong balance sheet over the long term,” wrote Sekar.

Source: Tech Crunch

Calendaring and note-taking apps have never really filled the void left behind when we moved away from our old, paper-based daily planners to digital devices. But a newly launched iOS app called Capsicum may help to change that. Like real-world daily planners from years ago, Capsicum lets you not only track your events and to-dos, it also offers a place to track other things not tied to a specific date and time — like your larger, longer-term goals, journal entries and even your daily habits — like whether you made it to the gym, or remembered to take your vitamins. 

The idea for the app comes from U.S. software engineer Ish ShaBazz, who was featured in the 2017 documentary “App: The Human Story,” and Australian designer Heidi Helen Pilypas. Both love beautiful planners and iOS apps, so around three years ago, they decided to work on a project that has now become Capsicum. 

The app’s name refers to a bell pepper, which is why it’s in the logo.

However, the name was chosen because the Latin root “capsa” means “box.” And the app uses individual boxes — components — throughout its design for things like the weather, your events, to-dos and more.

There are three main use cases for Capsicum, each with their own tab at the bottom of the home screen.

The daily planner section offers a home to your monthly, weekly and daily to-do lists.

This feels like a more natural way to plan things, in some cases — especially for writing down things that don’t have an exact time, like a reminder to make a doctor appointment or return your library books, for example. But you still need to slot those in around other events, like meetings or scheduled calls. Calendaring apps don’t have this sort of flexibility, which means we today turn to other apps — like to-do lists, Apple’s Notes or Reminders.

Capsicum, on the other hand, lets all these to-dos coexist in one place. Plus, you can sync Capsicum with Apple’s Calendars so you won’t miss your scheduled events. 

As you complete your daily to-dos, you can check them off just as you could a list in Apple’s Notes.

However, if you don’t get them done, they can be moved over to another day.

Another section of the daily planner lets you jot down free-form notes. This can be used for journaling or just writing down other things you need to remember — like your thoughts, moods or health concerns, perhaps.

The app’s center tab allows you to get a better handle on your habits. This is a particularly handy feature for anyone with a list of New Year’s resolutions in search of a tracking app. Here, you can log when you complete a habit — like working out, hydrating, reading, etc. — which you can do with a tap or a Siri Shortcut.

You also can add notes to your habits and look back at patterns over time to see if you’re meeting your goals.

The other main tab in the app is “Loose Leaf,” which offers a larger page than the one in the daily planner’s notes section, for writing long-form journal entries or anything else you want to remember. This can be a place for personal writing, or a place to make lists that don’t belong on a particular day — like your bucket list, travel ideas, redecorating plans or others that aren’t immediate “to-dos.”

In time, the team says the Loose Leaf section will also include a sketch pad, too.

Capsicum can be personalized with beautiful covers, decorative tapes and headings to match your style, to make it feel more like your own notebook and not a generic app. And you can create more than one notebook in the app — in case you want to maintain separate notebooks by year or for work and personal life, for instance.

The app is well-designed and feels like it fits somewhere in-between the simplicity of jotting down an item in Notepad and the structure of adding events in Calendar. That said, it’s still hard to abandon a history of notes and reminders from other apps, which makes it hard to switch. Plus, the search feature is a time travel option where you have to put in a date — which means you may not want to use it for things you need to pull up by keyword.

Capsicum is a subscription-based app, offered at either $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year. 

The app provides a 14-day trial, but unlike all other subscription apps, it doesn’t immediately begin charging you when the trial ends. If you decide you want to continue with Capsicum, you can choose to subscribe at any time. 

Source: Tech Crunch

911 emergency services in several states across the U.S. remain down after a massive outage at a CenturyLink data center.

The outage began after 12pm ET on Thursday, according to CenturyLink’s status page, and continues to cause disruption across 911 call centers. Some states have seen their services restored. CenturyLink has not said what caused the outage beyond an issue with a “network element,” but said in its latest update — around 11am ET on Friday — that the company said that it was “seeing good progress, but our service restoration work is not complete.”

In a tweet, the telecoms giant said it was “working tirelessly” to get its affected systems back up and running.

CenturyLink, one of the largest telecommunications providers in the U.S., provides internet and phone backbone services to major cell carriers, including AT&T and Verizon. Data center or fiber issues can have a knock-on effect to other companies, cutting out service and causing cell site blackouts.

In this case, the outage affected only cellular calls to 911, and not landline calls.

Several states sent emergency alerts to residents’ cell phones warning of the outage.

Among the areas affected include Seattle, Washington and Salt Lake City, Utah. Several other states, including Idaho, Oregon, Arizona and Missouri, are also affected, local news has reported.

Many other police departments tweeted out alternative numbers for 911 in the event of an emergency.

Police in Boston, Massachusetts tweeted that their service was restored this morning.

Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates and monitors 911 services, said the commission is investigating the outage.

“When an emergency strikes, it’s critical that Americans are able to use 911 to reach those who can help,” said Pai in a statement. “The CenturyLink service outage is therefore completely unacceptable, and its breadth and duration are particularly troubling.”

“I’ve directed the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau to immediately launch an investigation into the cause and impact of this outage. This inquiry will include an examination of the effect that CenturyLink’s outage appears to have had on other providers’ 911 services,” he said.

TechCrunch will have more when it comes in.

Source: Tech Crunch

We already know Alexa had a good Christmas — the app shot to the top of the App Store over the holidays, and the Alexa service even briefly crashed from all the new users. But Alexa, along with other smart speaker devices like Google Home, didn’t just have a good holiday — they had a great year, too. The smart speaker market reached critical mass in 2018, with around 41 percent of U.S. consumers now owning a voice-activated speaker, up from 21.5 percent in 2017.

According to a series of reports from RBC Capital Markets analysts released in December, the near doubling of the adoption rate for smart speakers in the U.S. was driven by growth in both Alexa and Google Home devices, while Apple’s HomePod played only a small role.

The firm found that U.S. penetration of Alexa-enabled devices reached 31 percent this year, compared with 41 percent overall for smart speakers.

It also forecast that Alexa would generate $18 billion to $19 billion in total revenue by 2021 — or ~5 percent of Amazon’s revenue — through a combination of device sales, incremental voice shopping sales and other platform revenues. In the U.S., there are now more than 100 million Alexa-enabled devices installed — a key milestone for Alexa to become a “critical mass platform,” the report noted.

RBC additionally called out Amazon’s progress with Alexa’s development, with launches like Alexa Guard, which listens for break-ins and smoke detector alarms; plus new features like local voice control for when the internet is down; location-based reminders; advanced routines; email integrations; expanded calling options; and many others.

Alexa’s third-party app ecosystem also grew in 2018, with 150 percent year-over-year growth in skills to reach over 60,000 total Alexa skills by year-end. That’s up from 40,000 skills in May; 25,000 in Q3 2017; and just 5,000 two years ago.

Google Home also gained traction in 2018, with U.S. penetration for Google devices growing to 23 percent, up from 8 percent in 2017. Each household owns around 1.7 devices, which leads a Google Home install base of around 43 million in the U.S., and around 9 million in other Google Home markets, the forecast said.

However, the report doesn’t see as much revenue coming in from Google Home over the next few years, compared with Alexa. Instead, it estimates that Google Home generated $3.4 billion in revenue this year, and will grow that to $8.2 billion by 2021.

But combined with Google’s other hardware products like Pixel, Nest and Chromecast, the hardware suite will have generated approximately $8.8 billion in 2018, and will grow to $19.6 billion in 2021.

This is the first year the analysts asked about Apple’s HomePod in the consumer survey, and they found its share of the U.S. smart speaker market remains small. Amazon has a 66 percent share to Google’s 29 percent. HomePod had 5 percent, it said.

Source: Tech Crunch

One of Silicon Valley’s prominent billionaires is in hot water after funding deceptive social media campaigns with echoes of Russia’s own political playbook. Reid Hoffman, who co-founded LinkedIn in 2003 and is now a partner at Greylock, footed the bill for a small political project with the aim of getting Democrat Doug Jones elected in 2017’s special election. Now, Hoffman is sorry — but he also maintains that he didn’t know where his money ended up.

It’s not clear what impact the project had in successfully electing Jones, but internal documents reveal that the effort known as Project Birmingham “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.” Those tactics are now widely regarded as both politically and professionally toxic as tech companies — most notably Facebook — continue to face intense scrutiny over their role in facilitating the spread of disinformation meant to influence U.S. political behavior.

As The New York Times reported:

The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.

In a statement following reporting from The New York Times and The Washington Post, Hoffman did not dispute the assertion that he funded the efforts, but denied any knowledge of the controversial tactics themselves.

“I want to make it clear from the outset that I had never even heard of this project before reading about it in the Times’ coverage,” Hoffman said in the statement, published to Medium. “The Times articles imply that I had knowledge of it and that I endorsed its tactics. Let me be absolutely clear: I do not.”

Hoffman went on to disavow the use of political disinformation intended to influence the outcome of an election.

“I would not have knowingly funded a project planning to use such tactics, and would have refused to invest in any organization that I knew might conduct such a project,” Hoffman said. “Nevertheless, I do have an apology to make and have learned a lesson here.”

In his Medium post Hoffman describes how he became more politically active after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He recounts how he funded dozens of political and civic engagement organizations in conjunction with a group called Investing in Us. “Our goal is to identify promising organizations and provide them with resources to accelerate positive change,” Hoffman said.

Many of those investments appear to be uncontroversial, including contributions to the Center on Rural Innovation and an organization called Opportunity at Work which helps connect Americans with job opportunities. As Hoffman explains, his entanglement in the Alabama Senate race came about through his choice to fund a group called American Engagement Technologies (AET):

One of the early organizations that we supported was American Engagement Technologies (AET), a group which sought to develop technical solutions to counteract fake news, bot armies, and other kinds of digital manipulation and disinformation, and to use social media and data analytics to increase civic engagement and improve access to accurate information about candidates and issues.

AET, in turn, provided funding to a group called New Knowledge. Through AET or otherwise, I have never personally authorized or directed any funding to New Knowledge. I — regretfully — do not know why AET chose to support New Knowledge or for what specific purposes, if any, this funding was allocated.

To reiterate yet again, I find the tactics that have been recently reported highly disturbing. For that reason, I am embarrassed by my failure to track AET — the organization I did support — more diligently as it made its own decisions to perhaps fund projects that I would reject.

Though Hoffman’s post did not specify an amount, The Washington Post reported that Hoffman invested $750,000 in AET. The group is helmed by Mikey Dickerson, a former Google engineer who served as the founding director of the USDS during Obama’s presidency.

Earlier this week, Facebook suspended the account of Jonathon Morgan, the head of New Knowledge. Morgan previously acknowledged that he set up a misleading Facebook page to test his ability to engage with conservative voters and bought less than $10 worth of Twitter retweets for the same goal. Morgan characterized this undertaking as “small-scale” and told The Washington Post that these efforts were made only in “his own capacity as a researcher seeking to understand the mechanics of disinformation tactics, not as New Knowledge’s leader.”

Last week, Doug Jones articulated his support for a federal probe into the role the disinformation tactics could have played in his successful Senate bid. Hoffman also expressed his support for a federal investigation.

“We cannot permit dishonest campaign tactics to go unchecked in our democracy — no matter which side they purportedly help,” Hoffman said.

Source: Tech Crunch

The secondary luxury goods market has been growing wildly in recent years, with more shoppers opting to both sell their lightly used luxury goods like clothing and jewelry for cold, hard cash, as well as buying the pre-owned, authenticated luxury goods of others.

One of the biggest beneficiaries of the trend is The RealReal, a nearly eight-year-old shopping destination for the growing population of people who might not be willing or able to purchase a new Hermes Birkin bag but are willing to buy one in like-new condition for considerably less. The idea — which seems to be working — is to create a virtuous cycle, wherein the bag’s original purchaser receives the bulk of that re-sale price, then uses the money to buy another new handbag (or a used one) that can be resold at a later point in time.

Another beneficiary of the trend: TrueFacet, a five-year-old, New York-based marketplace that claims to have more than 40,000 watches and 55,000 pieces of pre-owned authenticated watches and jewelry for sale at its site, and that has more recently begun offering pre-owned timepieces directly through brands like Fendi Timepieces, Raymond Weil and Roberto Coin that now partner with TrueFacet to carry their pre-owned timepieces with a manufacture warranty.

Apparently, shoppers are buying what they’re collectively selling. The company, which had previously raised $14.7 million in funding from investors, looks to be closing in on another $10 million round, judging by freshly filed SEC paperwork that shows it has so far raised $7 million in funding and is targeting $9.8 million altogether.

TrueFacet’s backers include Founders Co-op,  Freestyle Capital and Maveron, led by partner Jason Stoffer, who also happens to sit on the board of Dolls Kill, an edgy clothing marketplace that we wrote about on Monday.

TrueFacet has some tough competition in the space, including Crown & Caliber, a six-year-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based company that has never announced outside funding, and 15-year-old, Germany-based Chrono24, which has raised €21 million over the years. Both sell timepieces alone, however.

It also competes directly with The RealReal, which has raised nearly $300 million from investors and sells clothing and high-end home decor, as well as jewelry and watches. (The company doesn’t break out publicly which of these categories outpace the others in terms of sales.)

Interestingly, like The RealReal, which now operates permanent offline stores in both New York and L.A., TrueFacet is also crossing the chasm into the offline world, though it’s taking baby steps toward that end.

Specifically, earlier this month, it announced a partnership with Stephen Silver Fine Jewelry, which sells timepieces to many monied Bay Area VCs and other Silicon Valley bigs at stores in Redwood City and Menlo Park, Calif. For the time being at least, the jeweler will also sell pieces from TrueFacet’s collection.

Source: Tech Crunch

Elon Musk has filed a motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against him by the British cave rescuer who sued the billionaire entrepreneur for calling him a pedophile.

Musk’s motion presents numerous reasons to dismiss the defamation lawsuit, all of which come back to a two main points: Twitter is “infamous for invective and hyperbole,” and therefore should not be considered fact and these “imaginative attacks,” even if offensive, “are by their nature opinion and protected by the First Amendment.” 

Musk’s lawyers ask a single question in the request: “Accepting Unsworth’s well-pleaded allegations as true, would a reasonable reader believe that Musk’s statements were supported by objective facts or were instead “nonactionable opinion?”

The list of arguments laid out in the motion to dismiss are:

1. Unsworth must prove that the reasonable reader would believe Musk possessed private facts implicating Unsworth as a pedophile.
2. In context, Musk’s statements cannot reasonably be read as asserting underlying knowledge that Unsworth was a pedophile
3. Statements on unmoderated Internet forums are presumptively opinion.
4. Musk’s underlying argument is that “his over-the-top insults are not statements of fact.”
5. Musk disclosed the basis for his personal opinion: Thailand’s documented problems with sex tourism
6. Musk’s over-the-top insults are not statements of fact
7. Musk’s colloquial statements are not reasonably interpreted as statements of facts
8. Musk’s expressions of uncertainty show that his statements did not have a concrete factual foundation and were therefore opinion
9. Readers did not interpret Musk’s statements as factual assertions

Whether these arguments will be enough to convince a judge to dismiss the lawsuit is unclear. However, it raises a different question. If the argument is to be believed, it would suggest that other claims and promises Musk puts on Twitter shouldn’t be trusted as fact either.

The whole “pedo guy” episode began over the summer after Musk and employees at his companies, SpaceX, Tesla, and The Boring Company, became involved in an effort to extract 12 boys and their soccer coach from the Tham Luang Nang Non cave system located in Northern Thailand after flooding trapped the group for weeks. Musk’s team developed and then sent  mini submarine built out of rocket parts that he thought could help.

The team of divers who eventually rescued every person trapped in the cave didn’t use the mini-submarine, dubbed by Musk’s people as “Wild Boar.”

Unsworth, a British ex-pat who lives in Thailand, helped plan the rescue operation and recruited other cave diving experts. The fight began after Unsworth gave an interview on CNN International, in which he called the mini submarine a “PR stunt,” that it “had absolutely no chance of working” and that Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts.”

Musk subsequently lashed out on Twitter and insinuated that Unsworth was a pedophile. He later deleted the offending tweet and tried to backpedal — even offering an apology of sorts on Twitter. And it could have all ended there. But then Musk dug it all up again during a debate with ex-TechCrunch journalist Drew Olanoff — once again on Twitter. Olanoff had brought up the “pedo guy” attack as an example of Musk telling untruths.

Unsworth filed a lawsuit September in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against Musk for defamation. The lawsuit alleges that between July 15 and August 30, Musk periodically used Twitter and emails to the media to publish false and defamatory accusations against Unsworth, including accusations of pedophilia and child rape.

Read the entire motion here.

Source: Tech Crunch

Startups supporting startups are blazing a new trail with support from venture capitalists.

Co-working spaces like The Wing and The Riveter raked in funding rounds this year, as did Brex, the provider of a corporate card built specifically for startups. Now Carta, which helps companies manage their cap tables, valuations, portfolio investments and equity plans, has announced an $80 million Series D at a valuation of $800 million. The company, formerly known as eShares, raised the capital from lead investors Meritech and Tribe Capital, with support from existing investors.

The round brings Carta’s total funding to $147.8 million. Its existing investors include Spark Capital, Menlo Ventures, Union Square Ventures and Social Capital, though the latter didn’t participate in the Series D funding. Tribe Capital, however, is a new venture capital firm launched by Arjun Sethi, who previously led Social Capital’s investment in Carta, Jonathan Hsu and Ted Maidenberg, a trio of former Social Capital partners who exited the VC firm amid its transition from a traditional VC fund to a technology holding company. Tribe is said to be in the process of raising its own $200 million debut fund.

Founded in 2012 by Henry Ward (pictured), the Palo Alto-based company plans to use the latest investment to develop their transfer agent and equity administration products and services to better support startups transitioning into public companies. It also will launch additional products for investors to collect data from their portfolio companies and to manage their back office.

“We’ve come this far by changing how ownership management works for private companies—popularizing electronic securities and cap table software, combined with audit-ready 409As,” Ward wrote in an announcement. “But our ambitions go far beyond supporting privately-held, venture-backed companies.”

Carta, which counts Robinhood, Slack, Wealthfront, Squarespace, Coinbase and more as customers, currently manages $500 billion in equity. This year, Carta expanded its headcount from 310 employees to 450 employees, launched board management and portfolio insights products and completed a study in partnership with #Angels that highlighted the major equity gap female startup employees are victim to.

The study, released in September, revealed that women own just 9 percent of founder and employee startup equity, despite making up 35 percent of startup equity-holding employees. On top of that, women account for 13 percent of startup founders, but just 6 percent of founder equity — or $0.39 on the dollar.

Source: Tech Crunch

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is making some audacious promises again for the company’s network of electric fast chargers, known as Superchargers. This time, he’s aiming for 100 percent Tesla Supercharger coverage in Europe by next year.

In response to a question on Twitter, Musk said Tesla’s Supercharger coverage will extend to 100 percent of Europe in 2019. “From Ireland to Kiev, from Norway to Turkey,” Musk wrote.

A look at Tesla’s Supercharger map shows a high concentration of the fast chargers in Western Europe. Countries like Albania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Serbia and Moldova don’t have any Superchargers.

Musk also laid out plans to focus on cities, specifically to work with landlords to add home charging units at apartment buildings.

Musk then went further, this time in response to a Twitter follower who noticed that Superchargers planned for San Antonio and Austin in 2018 had yet to be completed. The billionaire entrepreneur said “all major highways in Texas will have Superchargers, all the way to Brownsville and across Mexico.”

He even laid out plans, although less specific, to add Superchargers to Africa in 2020. There are no Superchargers on the African continent.

Tesla’s Supercharger network was launched in 2012 in an effort to encourage owners of its electric vehicles to travel longer distances. A Supercharger adds up to 170 miles of range in about 30 minutes (although TechCrunch has experienced slightly longer charge times depending on location).

Musk has made bold promises for the company’s Supercharger network before. And while the company has made substantial progress and investment in its Supercharger network, it’s still nowhere near its previously promised target. 

In April 2017, Tesla said it would double its global network of Superchargers from more than 5,400 to more than 10,000 by the end of the year. It fell short of that goal, with about 8,250 Superchargers.

Earlier this year, Musk laid out plans to have 18,000 superchargers globally by the end 2018. As of December 27, Tesla has 11,583 Superchargers (within 1,386 Supercharger stations) globally.

Source: Tech Crunch