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Ford to open new lab to develop next-gen lithium-ion and solid-state batteries

Published April 27, 2021

Ford Motor Company will open a $185 million R&D battery lab to develop and manufacture battery cells and batteries, a first step toward the automaker possibly making battery cells in-house. The facility comes as yet another signal to consumers and other automakers that the auto giant is no longer hedging its bets on the transition to battery electric vehicles.

Company executives declined to provide a timeline on when Ford might scale its battery manufacturing, but it is clear that the company intends this facility to lay the groundwork for such a future.

The Ford Ion Park will be based in southeast Michigan and will be home to more than 150 employees across battery technology development, research and manufacturing. The facility will likely be around 200,000 square feet and will open at the end of 2022. The facility will be supported by Ford’s batteries benchmarking test laboratories in nearby Allen Park, Michigan, which is already testing battery cell construction and chemistries. Also nearby are Ford’s product development center in Dearborn and Ford’s battery cell assembly and e-motor plant in Rossville.

The new facility will be led by Anand Sankaran, who is currently Ford’s director of electrified systems engineering. He described it as a “learning lab” to create both “lab-scale and pilot-scale assembly of cells,” including next-gen lithium-ion and solid-state batteries.

Ford is thinking about the transition to BEVs in phases, Hau Thai-Tang, Ford’s chief product platform and operations officer, explained. In this first phase, when BEVs are being largely purchased by early adopters, Ford’s working with external supplier partners. The company is now preparing for phase two, when Ford will bring more products to market and BEVs will take more of the market share. “So in preparation for that next transition into the second phase, we want to give Ford the flexibility and the optionality to eventually vertically integrate,” Thai-Tang said.

“Our plan to lead the electric revolution will certainly be dependent on the progress that we make on battery energy density, as well as cost,” Thai-Tang told reporters Tuesday.

“The formation of the Ford Ion Park team is a key enabler for Ford to vertically integrate and manufacture batteries in the future,” Thai-Tang said. “This will help us better control our supply and deliver high-volume battery cells with greater range, lower cost and higher quality.”

This would be a huge boost for domestic manufacturing of battery cells, which is dominated by companies based in Asia, such as Panasonic (Tesla’s main supplier), South Korea-based LG Chem and SK Innovation, Ford’s current battery cell supplier. Executives said the global pandemic and the semiconductor shortage have highlighted the importance of having a localized and domestically controlled supply chain.

“We know in terms of batteries, it’s a very capital-intensive business to be in,” Thai-Tang said. “The best tier one suppliers in the world spend a large amount of their revenue on R&D spending, and then the capital expenditure required to build and stand up battery plants is quite high. So as we think about this, the scale and volume that we would need to have dedicated sites for Ford is a big consideration, and we’ve talked about how bullish we see this transition happening. We’re at a point where now, there’s sufficient scale for us to entertain having greater levels of vertical integration at some point.”

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Vista Equity takes minority stake in Canada’s Vena with $242M investment

Published April 27, 2021

Vena, a Canadian company focused on the Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software space, has raised $242 million in Series C funding from Vista Equity Partners.

As part of the financing, Vista Equity is taking a minority stake in the company. The round follows $25 million in financing from CIBC Innovation Banking last September, and brings Vena’s total raised since its 2011 inception to over $363 million.

Vena declined to provide any financial metrics or the valuation at which the new capital was raised, saying only that its “consistent growth and…strong customer retention and satisfaction metrics created real demand” as it considered raising its C round.

The company was originally founded as a B2B provider of planning, budgeting and forecasting software. Over time, it’s evolved into what it describes as a “fully cloud-native, corporate performance management platform” that aims to empower finance, operations and business leaders to “Plan to Grow” their businesses. Its customers hail from a variety of industries, including banking, SaaS, manufacturing, healthcare, insurance and higher education. Among its over 900 customers are the Kansas City Chiefs, Coca-Cola Consolidated, World Vision International and ELF Cosmetics.

Vena CEO Hunter Madeley told TechCrunch the latest raise is “mostly an acceleration story for Vena, rather than charting new paths.”

The company plans to use its new funds to build out and enable its go-to-market efforts as well as invest in its product development roadmap. It’s not really looking to enter new markets, considering it’s seeing what it describes as “tremendous demand” in the markets it currently serves directly and through its partner network.

“While we support customers across the globe, we’ll stay focused on growing our North American, U.K. and European business in the near term,” Madeley said.

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Vena says it leverages the “flexibility and familiarity” of an Excel interface within its “secure” Complete Planning platform. That platform, it adds, brings people, processes and systems into a single source solution to help organizations automate and streamline finance-led processes, accelerate complex business processes and “connect the dots between departments and plan with the power of unified data.”

Early backers JMI Equity and Centana Growth Partners will remain active, partnering with Vista “to help support Vena’s continued momentum,” the company said. As part of the raise, Vista Equity Managing Director Kim Eaton and Marc Teillon, senior managing director and co-head of Vista’s Foundation Fund, will join the company’s board.

“The pandemic has emphasized the need for agile financial planning processes as companies respond to quickly-changing market conditions, and Vena is uniquely positioned to help businesses address the challenges required to scale their processes through this pandemic and beyond,” said Eaton in a written statement.

Vena currently has more than 450 employees across the U.S., Canada and the U.K., up from 393 last year at this time.

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With Workfront, Adobe combines automated workflow with customer experience

Published April 27, 2021

Five months ago, Adobe purchased (for $1.5 billion) Workfront, a company that helps build marketing department workflows. Today the company is officially announcing how it intends to use it. As marketing executives try to balance mapping strategy to the creative process while building customized experiences, a marketing workflow tool would fit neatly into Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), and that’s where it has landed.

Alex Shootman, who was CEO at Workfront and is now VP and GM of Adobe Workfront, told me they see the tool as the system of record for the marketing department inside of AEM. While there is more than a hint of marketing in that explanation, the data from Workfront’s workflows acts as a record of the creative process.

As part of Adobe, the company has built hooks into Experience Manager and Creative Cloud to enable marketing’s creative work to move through an organized and auditable process, leaving a data trail that lets management know exactly what happened — a marketing system of record.

Shootman says having this system of record in place allows marketing teams to do several things. For starters, it lets them connect strategy to execution. “If you think about a CMO, he or she and their team is developing the key priorities for decisions for the year or for the quarter [and this helps them] take those key priorities and make sure that they are driving the activities within the marketing organization,” he said.

He says that involves connecting the people, processes and data within marketing into a single system where teams can iteratively plan on the work as changes arise. That’s where Workfront comes into play.

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Brent Leary, lead analyst at CRM Essentials, says the approach makes a great deal of sense. “Creating enough personalized content at scale to stay connected with customers as their needs evolve over time is a team sport. That calls for tighter collaboration throughout the creation process, and Workfront within the AEM brings a sophisticated project management capability to the creative process,” Leary said.

During the pandemic, that became imperative as the majority of sales moved online. That increased the need for speed and agility. Having this workflow tool in place inside the Adobe Experience Manager means it’s not only allowing marketing to build customized experiences for its customers, it also enables them to automate the workflows behind those customizations.

The way this could work in practice is a marketing team creates a campaign and maps it out in Workfront. From there, creatives get assigned tasks and these tasks show up in Creative Cloud. When they complete the assignment, it automatically goes back into Workfront where it will be reviewed, eventually get approved and get published to the Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool where it will be available for use by the entire marketing team.

When it comes to acquisitions, it’s hard to know how well they’ll turn out, but Workfront seems particularly well suited to the Adobe ecosystem, a tool that can help bring a missing workflow automation component to the entire creative process, while allowing marketing execs to see exactly how their strategy played out.

Adobe acquires marketing workflow startup Workfront for $1.5B

Adobe launches a new, simplified digital asset manager

Published April 27, 2021

Adobe today announced the launch of a new asset management tool, Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials. That’s a mouthful, but while the company didn’t necessarily simplify the name, the idea here is to give teams that work with lots of digital assets an easier-to-use management experience in the Adobe Experience Cloud than Adobe’s current enterprise-centric asset management tool can offer.

In addition, Adobe is also launching the first tool to integrate this new experience: the Adobe Journey Optimizer. This new tool is meant to help users leverage their customer data to build out customer journeys and figure out the best ways to deliver messages and content along that journey.

“The push towards digital content and building these richer, engaging experiences — customers expect it,” Elliot Sedegah, director of Strategy and Product Marketing, Adobe, told me. “Almost every interaction that you go along, you expect a rich experience. And not only at that point of just having richer material, like images or video, etc., but you expect it at every point of interaction with that customer. So that customer, if you think of it, isn’t just interacting with a brand, but our customers, they think of it as a customer journey. So using the same content, from awareness to conversion to post-sale and loyalty — they expect that same story to maintain. And it’s getting increasingly hard to get to all the different touchpoints.”

Image Credits: Adobe

Like with similar products, the idea here is to create a centralized, collaborative space for content creators and the teams that use their work. In that respect, this new tool isn’t necessarily all that different from other shared online file management services. But Adobe is also leveraging some of its unique capabilities. It’s using its AI smarts and Adobe Sensei platform to help users organize and tag their assets, for example, to make them more easily searchable. And the new tool is integrated with Adobe Asset Link, so creative professionals can search, browse and edit these assets directly from Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and XD without having to switch context.

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As Sedegah noted, not too long ago, it was mostly the creative teams and marketing that were involved in the content creation and management process. But today, this group also includes sales teams and customer support, for example, and the pandemic only accelerated this process.

Image Credits: Adobe

“[Our customers] have been forced to rethink their business models, rethink the way that they engage with customers — and it essentially accelerated this digital-everywhere process of the experiences customers get, the agility that customers expect from businesses, and then the number of people — and how they work — leveraging that content.”

So while Adobe’s enterprise asset management tools worked just fine before, the company’s users were telling it that it needed to do a better job at creating tools that made its asset management technology easier to use by more teams.

The first tool to integrate this new asset management experience directly is the Journey Optimizer. “That was a great opportunity for us to rethink that user experience that our customers wanted to deliver — and then make it easier for that person to do,” Sedegah said. “So as you’re building out a content journey — or maybe you’re designing a piece of content that’s going to get sent to maybe a customer as they engage with a brand — the digital assets appear right there for that author to use.”

Next up for integration is Workfront, the work management platform Adobe acquired last year. There’s an obvious synergy here between Workfront’s abilities to manage the planning, review and approval stages of a project and an asset management system like this.

The long-term strategy, though, is to integrate this experience across all Experience Cloud applications.

Adobe acquires marketing workflow startup Workfront for $1.5B

Teen banking service Step raises $100M Series C, announces Steph Curry’s investment

Published April 27, 2021

Step, the digital banking service aimed at teens and endorsed by TikTok star Charli D’Amelio, announced this morning the close of a $100 million round of Series C funding after growing to more than 1.5 million users just six months after launch. The new round, led by General Catalyst, comes shortly after Step’s $50 million Series B, announced at the end of last year after the startup hit half a million users in only two months post-launch.

The new round also includes participation from Step’s existing investors, Coatue, Stripe, Charli D’Amelio, The Chainsmokers, Will Smith and Jeffrey Katzenberg, and brings on newcomer Franklin Templeton, signaling a plan to move into investments is on the horizon. It also includes actor and musician Jared Leto. Step is also formally announcing NBA All-Star Stephen Curry as an investor, which had not previously been disclosed, as well as former Square executives Sarah Friar, Jacqueline Reses and Gokul Rajaram.

As a result of the fundraise, Kyle Doherty of General Catalyst is joining Step’s board. To date, Step has raised more than $175 million.

Image Credits: Step

According to CEO CJ MacDonald, Step hasn’t yet spent the money from its Series B, but believes the additional funds can help the startup grow more quickly.

“We’ve signed up more than a million and a half accounts in the first six months. We’re signing up 10,000 accounts-plus a day, and there’s just a lot of things that we want to do to bring this to millions and millions of households to help educate the next generation be smarter with money,” he says. At the time of the Series B, for comparison, Step said it was adding around 7,000 to 10,000 accounts per day.

“Honestly we don’t need the capital,” MacDonald added. “It’s just we think speed to market is really key and we think we can accelerate our growth and invest in infrastructure.”

Mobile bank Current raises $220 million Series D, triples valuation to $2.2B

The company is also planning to hire across operations, engineering, product and design, to double its now 65-person team over the next year.

Step today competes in a crowded market of mobile banking services aimed at a younger demographic, but it’s one of very few that targets teenagers ages 13 to 18. Through Step’s app, teens gain access to an FDIC-insured bank account without fees and a secured Visa card that helps them establish credit before they turn 18. The app also offers Venmo-like functionality for sending money to friends.

Image Credits: Step

Step’s growth so far has benefitted from a combination of factors, including word-of-mouth, use of social media and its popular referral program, which has paid out a few dollars per new sign-up. Step has also leveraged its partnerships with social media influencers like D’Amelio and Josh Richards, as well as celebs like Step investor Justin Timberlake.

The company believes the Curry announcement may also help to raise awareness about the banking app. As a father of three, if Curry talks about introducing Step to his own children, people will take notice.

While the additional funds are focused on driving growth, Step is also thinking about its future as its existing users begin to age up. The company plans to enter into the credit and lending market, as well as introduce investments at some point in the future. The Franklin Templeton investment could be useful here, MacDonald notes.

“Franklin [Templeton is] obviously, one of the largest financial institutions in the world. And, as we start thinking about investments and the journey of the customer, to have a great brand like Franklin Templeton that’s invested in this round — I think it’s just a testament to where they see the world going,” he says.

Step’s fundraise falls on the same day that competitor Current and Greenlight, both which focus on families, also raised new rounds.

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Arm launches its latest chip design for HPC, data centers and the edge

Published April 27, 2021

Arm today announced the launch of two new platforms, Arm Neoverse V1 and Neoverse N2, as well as a new mesh interconnect for them. As you can tell from the name, V1 is a completely new product and maybe the best example yet of Arm’s ambitions in the data center, high-performance computing and machine learning space. N2 is Arm’s next-generation general compute platform that is meant to span use cases from hyperscale clouds to SmartNICs and running edge workloads. It’s also the first design based on the company’s new Armv9 architecture.

Not too long ago, high-performance computing was dominated by a small number of players, but the Arm ecosystem has scored its fair share of wins here recently, with supercomputers in South Korea, India and France betting on it. The promise of V1 is that it will vastly outperform the older N1 platform, with a 2x gain in floating-point performance, for example, and a 4x gain in machine learning performance.

Image Credits: Arm

“The V1 is about how much performance can we bring — and that was the goal,” Chris Bergey, SVP and GM of Arm’s Infrastructure Line of Business, told me. He also noted that the V1 is Arm’s widest architecture yet. He noted that while V1 wasn’t specifically built for the HPC market, it was definitely a target market. And while the current Neoverse V1 platform isn’t based on the new Armv9 architecture yet, the next generation will be.

N2, on the other hand, is all about getting the most performance per watt, Bergey stressed. “This is really about staying in that same performance-per-watt-type envelope that we have within N1 but bringing more performance,” he said. In Arm’s testing, NGINX saw a 1.3x performance increase versus the previous generation, for example.

Image Credits: Arm

In many ways, today’s release is also a chance for Arm to highlight its recent customer wins. AWS Graviton2 is obviously doing quite well, but Oracle is also betting on Ampere’s Arm-based Altra CPUs for its cloud infrastructure.

“We believe Arm is going to be everywhere — from edge to the cloud. We are seeing N1-based processors deliver consistent performance, scalability and security that customers want from Cloud infrastructure,” said Bev Crair, senior VP, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute. “Partnering with Ampere Computing and leading ISVs, Oracle is making Arm server-side development a first-class, easy and cost-effective solution.”

Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud and Tencent are both investing in Arm-based hardware for their cloud services as well, while Marvell will use the Neoverse V2 architecture for its OCTEON networking solutions.

2021 will be a calmer year for semiconductors and chips (except for Intel)

ZenGo raises $20 million for its secure crypto wallet app

Published April 27, 2021

ZenGo, a mobile app to manage your cryptocurrencies, has raised a $20 million Series A funding round led by Insight Partners. ZenGo is a non-custodial wallet, which means that the company doesn’t manage your crypto assets for you — you remain in control.

Other investors include Distributed Global and Austin Rief Ventures. Existing investors Benson Oak, Samsung Next, Elron, Collider Ventures, FJ Labs and others also participated in today’s funding round.

What makes ZenGo different from other wallet apps is that the company is trying to build something that is more secure than your average crypto wallet while remaining simple to use and understand. It competes with other non-custodial wallets, such as Coinbase Wallet (not Coinbase.com), Argent, etc.

In particular, ZenGo is based on multiparty computation (MPC). When you first create your wallet, ZenGo generates multiple secrets that are stored and encrypted in different ways. It means that the company can’t access your tokens directly and you can recover your wallet if you lose your phone.

Other crypto companies focused on infrastructure and enterprise clients have also opted for MPC as their security model. Fireblocks, a company that has recently raised $133 million, is one example.

But ZenGo is building a consumer app. In 2020, the company has processed more than $100 million in crypto transactions from 100,000 users. ZenGo has reached the same milestone in the first three months of 2021 and added another 100,000 users.

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You can browse DeFi projects through ZenGo and access savings pools. The startup takes a cut on these investments.

With today’s funding round, ZenGo plans to expand with the same philosophy in mind. You can expect support for more chains and assets, more partnerships and options to buy cryptocurrencies and convert them to fiat money, etc.

The company recently announced plans to launch a debit card. This way, users will be able to convert their crypto assets and then spend them wherever Visa cards are accepted. In other words, ZenGo is building a crypto super app with a focus on security.

Image Credits: ZenGo

Mobile bank Current raises $220 million Series D, triples valuation to $2.2B

Published April 27, 2021

U.S.-based challenger bank Current, which has now grown to nearly 3 million users, announced this morning it has raised a $220 million round of Series D funding, led by new investor Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The funding swiftly follows Current’s $131 million Series C at the end of last year, at which point the company had doubled its user base over just six months to more than 2 million users.

As a result of the new round, the fintech company has roughly tripled its valuation in five months, to $2.2 billion.

Other participants in the round include returning investors Tiger Global Management, TQ Ventures (the fund managed by media executive Scooter Braun), Avenir, Sapphire Ventures, Foundation Capital, Wellington Management and EXPA. David George, who led the round with a16z, will become a Current board member.

Current began its life as a teen debit card controlled by parents, but later expanded to offer personal checking accounts powered by the same underlying banking technology. Like a range of modern-day “neobanks,” or digital banks, the Current app offers a baseline of standard features like free overdrafts, no minimum balance requirements, faster direct deposits, instant spending notifications, banking insights, free ATMs, check deposits using your phone’s camera and more. It also last year launched a points rewards program in an effort to better differentiate its service from the growing number of competitors and became one of the first banks to transfer the early round of stimulus payments during the pandemic.

These days, Current is partnering with creators, like the recently announced MrBeast (aka Jimmy Donaldson), who said last week on his YouTube channel that he will personally send $1 to the first 100,000 people who sign up using his Creator code. MrBeast is also an investor.

Teen banking service Step raises $100M Series C, announces Steph Curry’s investment

Like other fintechs in its same space, Current has benefitted from the younger generation’s adoption of mobile banking apps instead of larger, traditional banks, which they feel don’t serve their interests. Its average customer age is 27, for example. Digital banks can keep costs down by not having to pay for the overhead of brick-and-mortar locations, allowing them to roll out benefits like reduced or zero account fees and other consumer-friendly protections.

Current today continues to offer teen banking, in a challenge to mobile banking app Step, which has also leveraged social media influencers to get the word out with a younger demographic. But Step today is appealing to the 13 to 18-year-old crowd directly, offering banking services and a secured card. Current, meanwhile, targets its service to the parents.

Its teen account costs $36 per year, while personal checking is available both as a free and premium ($4.99/mo) service. The company in the past has said its primary focus is the more than 130 million Americans who live paycheck to paycheck. This continues to be its main drive today, though the mission may attract a broader slice of the American population over time.

“We are still focused on onboarding people to the financial system, making sure that everyone has access to everything, and then democratizing — or going out and getting that value — in this new world that’s being rewritten and bringing it back to as many people as possible,” says Current CEO and founder Stuart Sopp. “Now, in that increase of scope and time. I think we’re going to pick up more and more people.”

Current says the new funds will be used to grow the company and its member base as it expands it range of banking products. One key area of new investment will be cryptocurrency, it says, which will involve a partnership and an educational component to help Current’s users better understand the crypto market.

As it turns out, Sopp’s background includes crypto, in addition to Wall Street trading. In fact, an early version of Current designed by Sopp and CTO Trevor Marshall involved crypto.

Kids-focused fintech Greenlight raises $260M in a16z-led Series D, nearly doubles valuation to $2.3B

“A little-known fact is that Current started with Bitcoin wallet addresses and Ripple gateways,” he says. But the team realized the technology was a little too nascent at the time, and moved to mobile banking. “We have this background, and this knowledge of how it all works. Now do we need to build it ourselves? No, I don’t think we need to build it all ourselves. There’s lots of good companies out there,” he says.

Crypto fits into Current’s vision of democratizing access to financial systems to those in the U.S. who are today underserved by traditional banking and investing products and services.

“There’s a ton of value being created [in crypto] and we want to make sure we have this nexus of providing safe, and trustworthy financial services in that world, as well as what we already exist in,” notes Sopp. “And then, lending, credit cards,” he adds, noting how important these moves are “done safely, in a respectful way for our demographic — because traditionally most of our members have a FICO score of 650.”

In addition, Current will use the new funds for hiring across all roles, including marketing, product, engineering, finance, customer success, fraud and risk, and, of course, crypto. The company today has 100 employees, and plans to grow to around 200 or 300 in the next 18 months.

Current’s fundraise remarkably falls on the same day that competitor Step and Greenlight, both which focus on families, also raised new rounds.

“This new generation of customers doesn’t want to bank in physical branches,” said a16z’s David George, in a statement. “We believe there will be a shift in the next 10 years to mobile and consumer-focused banking services powered by innovation in technology, and with Current’s exceptional growth over the past year, they’ve clearly demonstrated they’re at the forefront of this trend. Their product is among the best in the market, and they have proven an ability to reach customers who previously were unserved or underserved by traditional banks,” he said.

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Tellius announces $8M Series A to build ML-fueled business data query tool

Published April 27, 2021

Getting actionable business information into the hands of users who need it has always been a challenge. If you have to wait for experts to help you find the answers, chances are you’re going to be too late. Enter Tellius, an early-stage startup building a solution to help business users find the information they need when they need it.

Today the company announced an $8 million Series A led by Sands Capital Ventures, with participation from Grotech. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $17 million, according to the company.

CEO and founder Ajay Khanna says the company is attempting to marry two technologies that have traditionally lived in silos: business intelligence and artificial intelligence. He believes that bringing them together can lead to greater wisdom and help close the insight gap.

“Tellius is an AI-driven decision intelligence platform, and what we do is we combine machine learning — AI-driven automation — with a Google-like natural language interface, so combining the left brain and the right brain to enable business teams to get insights on the data,” Khanna told me.

The idea is to let the machine learning teams and the business analysts continue to do their thing, but provide an application where business users can put all of that to work. “We believe that to go from data to decisions, you need to know not only what happened, but why things change and how you can improve your company,” he said.

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The product takes aim at three employee groups. The first is the business user, who can simply query the data with a natural language question to get results. The second is a data analyst, who can get more granular by choosing a specific model to base the query on, and finally a data scientist who can enhance the query with Python or Spark code.

It connects to various data sources, including Salesforce and Google Analytics, data lakes like Snowflake, csv files to take advantage of Excel data or cloud storage tools like Amazon S3. It comes in two versions: one that the customer can connect to the cloud infrastructure provider of choice, and one which they run as a service and manage for the customers.

Khanna says that as companies struggled to change the way they do business during the pandemic, they needed the kind of insights his company provides, and business grew 300% last year as a result.

The startup launched in 2016 after Khanna sold a previous company, which allowed him to bootstrap while in stealth. They spent a couple of years building the product and brought the first version of Tellius to market in Q3 2018. That’s when they took a $7.5 million seed round.

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DoorDash announces new pricing for restaurants, with commissions as low as 15%

Published April 27, 2021

DoorDash is announcing new pricing plans for the restaurants that use the platform for pickups and deliveries.

Before this, the company did not offer standardized pricing across restaurants. However, the question of how high delivery app fees might go (and how parsimonious the payments might be for restaurants as a result) prompted DoorDash to publish a long blog post about its fee structure last fall.

In fact, Oregon and Washington have passed caps on delivery fees, while lawmakers in California, New York and Texas have proposed similar caps. On a call with reporters to discuss the new pricing, DoorDash COO Christopher Payne denied that the company changed its pricing to appease lawmakers.

“This is not designed in response to legislation,” Payne said. “It’s designed in response to listening to restauranteurs and learning what they need.”

DoorDash now offers three plans: DoorDash Basic, where restaurants only pay a 15% commission on deliveries, which shifts “a higher portion of the delivery cost to the customer” and supports a smaller delivery area; DoorDash Plus, where restaurants pay 25% to be part of DoorDash’s DashPass subscription program and get increased visibility in the DoorDash app; and DoorDash Premier, where restaurants pay 30% in exchange for the lowest customer fees, the largest delivery area and a growth guarantee of at least 20 orders per month across pickup, delivery and DoorDash-owned Caviar.

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Across all plans, DoorDash says it will now charge only a 6% commission on pickup orders.

The company’s announcement includes statements from restaurant owners who are adopting the new plans. For example, here’s Sherry Copeland, owner of Jai Meals in Plano, Texas:

Jai Meals operates out of a local mall, so delivery has been an important part of how I have made up for lost income over the past year of dine-in closures. Despite this, my previous commission didn’t work for my business; it was hard to absorb that high of a cost, especially when delivery became a large percentage of my orders. With the Basic plan, I can offer delivery to customers, who increasingly enjoy the convenience delivery provides, but at a cost that is more aligned with my products, my goals and my customers’ needs.

Payne said these plans will become available to all restaurants on DoorDash today, although it may take up to five days for the new pricing to fully take effect. He added that DoorDash has been testing these plans over the past few months and that “we believe this will have negligible impact — no impact, really — on our economics, nor on Dasher earnings.”

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