1010Computers | Computer Repair & IT Support

1 … 223 224 225 226 227 … 2,385

At Extra Crunch Live, Felicis’ Aydin Senkut and Guideline’s Kevin Busque will look back on the Series B deal that brought them together

Published February 8, 2021

Aydin Senkut is a Swiss Army knife of an investor. He has been on the Midas List for the past seven years, with early investments in companies like Shopify, Rovio, Fitbit, Ayden, Credit Karma, SoundHound and more.

One such investment is Guideline, an enterprise tech company focused on giving small businesses a simplified way to offer affordable 401ks to employees. Guideline has raised nearly $140 million from investors such as Tiger Global Management, Greyhound, Generation Investment Management, Propel and, of course, Felicis.

It should go without saying that we’re thrilled to have Senkut and Guideline founder and CEO Kevin Busque join us for this week’s episode of Extra Crunch Live.

The new and improved Extra Crunch Live pairs founders and the investors who led their earlier rounds to talk about how the deal went down, from the moment they met to the conversations they had (including some disagreements) to the relationship as it exists today. Hell, we may even take a peek at the original pitch deck that made it all happen.

Then, we’ll turn our eyes back to you, the audience. That same founder/investor duo (in this case, Guideline founder and CEO Kevin Busque and Felicis’ Aydin Senkut) will take a look at your pitch decks and give their own feedback. (If you haven’t yet submitted a pitch deck to be torn down on Extra Crunch Live, you can do so here.)

The hour-long episode is sandwiched between two 30-minute rounds of networking. From start to finish, it goes from 11:30 a.m. PST/2:30 p.m. EST to 1:30 p.m. PST/4:30 p.m. EST. And Extra Crunch Live will come to you at the same time, every week, with a new pair of speakers.

In this case, we’ll be talking to Senkut and Busque about the $15 million Series B investment that Felicis led in the startup: How did they meet, what attracted them to one another, and ultimately, what made them decide to be financially bound together for the foreseeable future.

For now, let’s learn a bit more about Senkut and Busque, shall we?

Before starting Felicis Ventures (and serving as managing partner), Senkut was a senior manager at Google responsible for strategic partner development and account management in Asia Pacific. He joined the search giant in 1999 as its first product manager to launch Google’s first international sites. He then became the company’s first international sales manager.

Alongside an impressive portfolio of both angel and institutional investments, Senkut is about as well-rounded as a tech leader can be.

Kevin Busque, meanwhile, founded Guideline in 2015 and has since amassed more than 17,500 small businesses on the platform with nearly $4 billion in assets under management. Before Guideline, Busque spent seven years at TaskRabbit where he was a co-founder and VP of Technology. Busque deeply understands what it takes to go from idea to MVP to product market fit to hypergrowth.

This episode of Extra Crunch Live airs at 3 p.m. EST/12 p.m. PST on Wednesday, February 10.

As a reminder, Extra Crunch Live is for Extra Crunch members only. We’re coming to you with a new pair of speakers every week, and you can catch everything you missed on demand if you can’t join us live. It’s worth the cost of the subscription on its own, but EC members also get access to our premium content, including market maps and investor surveys. Long story short? Subscribe, smarty. You won’t regret it.

Senkut and Busque join an impressive list of guests on the show.

Full details to register for these events are below.

See you on Wednesday!

Powered by WPeMatico

Ethena, which sends bite-sized nudges for compliance training, shifts its focus amid new capital

Published February 8, 2021

Ethena co-founders Roxanne Petraeus and Anne Solmssen began their company with a clear goal: There needs to be a more modern, and effective, way to deploy anti-harassment training to employees. Ethena’s solution is to send employees bite-sized monthly “nudges” or pings with five-minute lessons, replacing the usual one-hour annual workshop with more flexible learning.

The startup raised $2 million off of that vision in June, and today has announced it has raised follow-on funding with the same exact amount, led by GSV. The startup currently has $5 million in venture capital, with investors including Homebrew, Neo and Village Global.

The follow-on capital comes right after Ethena has had some solid growth itself. The startup closed a couple major contracts with companies including Netflix, Zoom and Zendesk, and tells TechCrunch that more than 20,000 active employees complete its monthly training.

Solid growth and new cash is where the story could stop for now, but Petraeus tells TechCrunch that early momentum has also inspired a shift of sorts in what Ethena is trying to accomplish.

“When we initially launched in Feb 2020, we thought that for our first year, we’d focus entirely on scaling companies because only startups would be interested in an innovative approach to compliance training,” she said. “What’s changed is we’ve learned that even large enterprises want a better approach, deeper impact and are willing to be innovative in a space historically dominated by lawyers and legacy e-learning providers.”

Ethena raises $2 million in seed funding for smarter anti-harassment software

The startup is expanding its offering from anti-sexual harassment training to a wide variety of training courses focused on compliance, from financial compliance to code of conduct measures. The shift wasn’t because of a lack of interest from customers, the co-founder said, but instead demand from existing enterprise customers to offer more than just a singular topic.

“We think taking a specific sector-based approach can actually narrow the impact we’re having,” Petraeus said. “So we are trying to take a really inclusive approach,” from the start on what kind of topics should be treated as more than “just checking off a box.”

Petraeus, an army veteran, says that Ethena’s confidence in effectiveness and outcomes comes from military data on how adults learn.

“We know that traditional training just isn’t effective at behavior change, and there are some studies that show that it’s a pretty big backlash with increased unconscious bias after training versus before.” The startup differentiates from other micro-learning plays in its curriculum.

The curriculum is designed to be consumed over the course of a year instead of in an annual hour-long session. This tiny iteration is enough to give employees a repetitive way to understand the content. “We’re experimenting with things like graphic novels and podcasts to present training,” Petraeus said. “Just making sure whatever we’re doing yesterday is important tomorrow, because I think it’s important for us to be agile content creators.”

But Ethena’s biggest differentiation, Petraeus says, is its content. The pandemic has boasted a whole new sort of situation that employees need help, or proactive guidance, navigating. Petraeus says that Ethena’s monthly cadence gives it flexibility to adopt “modern” scenarios like Slack culture and Zoom etiquette. Ethena’s top performing training nudges in 2020 included lessons on online harassment prevention and mental health inclusivity.

The micro-learning approach has long been popular among edtech companies as a way to sneak or gamify small lessons into a workflow. So far, Ethena says over 90% of 150,000 in-app learner feedback notes are positive, saying the information is engaging and relevant. In Q4, Ethena saw learner growth of more than 250% quarter over quarter.

GSV’s Deborah Quazzo, who led Ethena’s seed and now this follow-on financing, said that it’s “not a coincidence that they’ve picked up some of the best logos in the world at an early stage,” referring to Ethena’s big customers. Quazzo thinks the compliance market has had very limited innovation so far, even though it’s a massive opportunity.

“They are seeing such strong product market fit and customers are pulling them into areas of content extension, so having more room to run faster made total sense,” she said.

This startup is making customized sexual harassment training that it says employees won’t hate (or forget)

Powered by WPeMatico

Jiobit launches an improved version of its kid (or pet) tracker, the Jiobit Next

Published February 8, 2021

A Chicago-based startup, Jiobit, wanted to make a better child location tracker than the bulky smartwatches and other insecurely designed products already on the market. So in 2018, it launched its own modular kid tracker — a small dongle of sorts that could be tied to shoelaces, belt loops or school backpacks, for example. Today, the company is out with a new generation of this device, the Jiobit Next, which aims to improve accuracy, battery life, reliability and more.

The company says it took its two years’ of learning and customer feedback into account when developing the new design, which is today used not only by parents, but also by pet owners.

The updated version of the Jiobit, now $129.99, is a small device that weighs less than four quarter coins, and includes a combination of radios — Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular and GPS — as well as sensors, including an accelerometer/pedometer, temperature sensor and barometer.

Image Credits: Jiobit

The upgraded version now includes a new antenna system designed to increase performance inside schools, stores, high rises and other challenging signal environments, the company claims.

It also leverages the reach of low-power, wide-area (LPWA) wireless networks in order to better serve rural regions where cellular coverage is limited and spotty. This allows the device to still be tracked when outside of Wi-Fi or Bluetooth mesh networks.

The new Jiobit is also waterproof (IPX8) up to five feet of water for up to 30 minutes and includes an alert button that instantly notifies loved ones that the user is lost or in danger. This button can be customized through the Jiobit app as to which family members will receive the alert, or it can even be turned off — which may be useful if the child is too young to understand how to use it.

Family-tracking app Life360 launches ‘Bubbles,’ a location-sharing feature inspired by teens on TikTok

Jiobit owners can continue to monitor the device through the app or now, a web app that includes alerting and notification controls. This opens up the service to more than just families — it could be used by organizations to deploy Jiobit into the field.

Like some software-based tracking apps, the device supports features like “Trusted Places,” which are geofenced areas where you expect the device to be at certain times, like school or maybe a doggie day care. When the device is not in a Trusted Place, you can enable “Live Mode” to watch its movement in real time.

Image Credits: Jiobit

Another improvement focuses on battery life. The upgraded version offers 50% longer battery life than the prior version, the company says. Under typical use cases, the Jiobit will last up to 10 days between charges, though it lasts longer when on standby and not in active use. (That may be why pet owners are seeing slightly longer battery life of 10-20 days, for instance.)

The original idea for Jiobit had come about because founder John Renaldi, a previous VP at Motorola, was shocked to find that most child trackers on the market were storing their certificate keys in the clear and were hackable. He wanted to build a more secure alternative, and brought on co-founder and CTO Roger Ady, a previous director of engineering at Motorola, to help.

Today, the Jiobit has its own dedicated security chip to communicate with the company’s servers, and uses its AES-256 “Jiobit TrustChip” technology to encrypt data both at rest and in transit with TLS1.2 encryption. It also refuses to download any software that’s not cryptographically signed by Jiobit in order to prevent malware or other “rogue” software from being installed.

Image Credits: Jiobit

The service itself, meanwhile, is compliant with U.S. children’s privacy regulations (COPPA).

The new Jiobit Next will work only within the U.S., while the first generation works internationally across 146 countries. But both will continue to be supported by way of subscriptions. Users can choose between a two-year subscription plan ($8.99/month), a six-month subscription plan ($12.99/month) or a month-to-month subscription plan ($14.99/month). These don’t require a cellular plan or SIM card from your existing carrier, like other child trackers and smartwatches.

To date, the startup says it’s raised $12 million in outside investment, including from Netgear and other Midwest VC firms. Jiobit isn’t disclosing how many devices it has sold to date, specifically, but says it’s in the “mid-five-figure range.”

The new device is on pre-order starting today and will be sold later this month on its website, and then Amazon, Chewy and Target. It has also partnered with family tracking app Life360 to offer special pricing.

Jiobit launches its more secure, modular child location tracker starting at $100

Powered by WPeMatico

Equity Monday: Tesla buys bitcoin, Nexthink raises and Bumble

Published February 8, 2021

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

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and be sure to check out last week’s main ep that dug into Robinhood, Miami and a host of other topics.

This morning we had a pile of news to get through. Here’s the rundown:

  • Pony.ai raised another $100 million, which underscores our growing thesis that there is no amount of money yet that will produce the tech required for self-driving cars to work. Perhaps we will get there, but it is going to cost a pretty penny or two.
  • Sticking to cars, the Apple-Kia tie-up is kaput, which we should have known the moment it became known. Apple previously bought startup Drive.ai back in 2019, of course.
  • Vroom, a 2020 IPO, bought a Super Bowl ad. Who would have expected that? Its shares are up, however, after the ad.
  • Still on the car beat, Tesla bought $1.5 billion in bitcoin, and may accept the stuff as tender to buy its vehicles in the future. The move sent the price of bitcoin higher.
  • Clubhouse got banned in China.
  • Phable raised $12 million, Nexthink raised $180 million and Bumble is targeting a higher share price in its impending IPO.
  • And we may have figured out the ∆ between what investors are saying about the seed market, and what data has largely said.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

A lake house architect, a Miami VC and a homeowner walk into a wine bar

Powered by WPeMatico

Getaway, a startup building tiny cabins, raises $41.7M

Published February 8, 2021

Getaway CEO Jon Staff said that while the startup’s offerings weren’t designed with a pandemic in mind, they turned out to be well-suited for a time when people were eager to find safe ways to get off Zoom and out of their homes.

Founded in 2015, Getaway builds “Outposts” — collections of tiny cabins in rustic locations within a two-hour drive of major cities like Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles and New York. Those cabins sound perfect for socially distanced retreats, with guests checking themselves in, each cabin built with its own fire pit and spaced 50 to 150 feet from the others, with no common areas.

Staff told me that rather than promoting traditional tourist activities, Getaway emphasizes disconnecting from all the stresses and distractions of modern life. So its cabins don’t include Wi-Fi, and they also have lockboxes where visitors can hide their phones for the duration of their visits.

“We try to get you to do nothing, quite literally,” he said. “How few moments are there in life when you really have enough free time that you could do nothing? And if not nothing, have a deep conversation with your partner, or take the time to cook a good meal and really enjoy the experience with people who are there sitting next to the campfire with you?”

Staff acknowledged that some investors were skeptical about Getaway’s insistence on building the cabins and Outposts itself. He recalled talking to tech-focused venture capitalists who would ask, “Why isn’t this a platform? Why isn’t it going to be worth $1 billon a year from now?” while potential investors from the real estate world would want to know, “How tall of a skyscraper do you want to build?”

“For a while, I had this anxiety that we don’t fit in any box,” he said. “But I learned to appreciate the benefits of not fitting in any box — that’s where innovation really lies.”

Getaway lifestyle image

Image Credits: Getaway

And the Getaway approach seemed to resonate in 2020, with bookings increasing 150% year-over-year and the startup’s Outposts operating at nearly 100% occupancy. Today it’s announcing that it has raised $41.7 million in Series C funding — first revealed in a regulatory filing and led by travel and hospitality-focused firm Certares.

Getaway plans to use the funding to expand to at least 17 Outposts this year, up from 12 in 2020 and nine in 2019. The startup has now raised more than $81 million in total funding, according to Crunchbase.

Staff said that eventually, Getaway could also add other products and services, because, “The brand is not about tiny houses or tiny cabins, the brand is about [the fact that] the world is too noisy and too connected over the long haul. Getaway could be doing other things to solve that problem.”

At the same time, he said it’s crucial to remain clear and focused on the experience that Getaway wants to provide.

“We always try to remind ourselves that we are not creating the experience at Getaway,” he said. “You’re creating the experience and, if we’re doing it well, we’re facilitating it, we’re giving you everything you need and nothing you don’t … There’s a lot of freedom to make of it what you want as the guest, but there are also boundaries.”

For example, Staff said that there have been requests to offer Getaway Outposts for work retreats, but that’s not what they’re designed for: “We’re not going to police it, but we’re not going to put in Wi-Fi.”

Where top VCs are investing in travel, tourism and hospitality tech

Powered by WPeMatico

BeyondID grabs $9M Series A to help clients implement cloud identity

Published February 8, 2021

BeyondID, a cloud identity consulting firm, announced a $9 million Series A today led by Tercera. It marked the first investment from Tercera, a firm that launched earlier this month with the goal of investing in service startups like Beyond.

The company focuses on helping clients manage security and identity in the cloud, taking aim specifically at Okta customers. In fact, the firm is a platinum partner for Okta. As they describe their goals, they help clients in a variety of areas, including identity and access management, secure app modernization, Zero Trust security, cloud migration and integration services.

CEO and co-founder Arun Shrestha has a deep background in technology, including working with Okta from its early days. Shrestha came on board in 2012 as the head of customer success. When he began, the startup was in early days, with just 50 customers. When he left five years later just before the IPO, it had more than 3,500.

Along the way, he gained a unique level of expertise in the Okta tool set, and he decided to put that to work to help Okta customers implement and maximize Okta usage, especially in companies with complex implementations. He launched BeyondID in 2018 with the intention of focusing on systems integrations and managing a company’s identity in the cloud.

“We believe we are becoming a managed identity service provider, so managing anything identity, anything related to cybersecurity. We’re helping these companies by being a one-stop shop for companies acquiring, deploying and managing identity services,” Shrestha explained.

Tercera launches with $225M to fund cloud consulting firms

It seems to be working. The last couple of years the company revenues grew at 300% and as it matures, and the growth rates settle a bit, it’s still expected to grow between 70 and 100% this year. The firm has 250 customers, including FedEx, Major League Baseball, Bain Capital and Biogen.

It currently has 75 employees serving those customers with plans to grow that number in the next year with the help from today’s investment. As Shrestha adds new employees, he sees building a diverse workforce as a crucial goal for his company.

“Diversity is absolutely critical to our long-term sustainable success, and it’s also the right thing to do,” he said. He says that building an organization that promotes women and people of color is a key goal of his as the leader of the company and something he is committed to.

Chris Barbin, who is managing partner and founder at lead investor Tercera, says that he chose BeyondID as the firm’s first investment because he believes identity is central to the notion of digital transformation. As more companies move to the cloud, they need help understanding how security and identity work differently in a cloud context, and he sees BeyondID playing a critical role in helping clients get there.

“BeyondID is in a rapidly growing space and has an impressive customer list that represents nearly every industry. Arun and the leadership team have a strong vision for the firm, deep ties into Okta and they’re incredibly passionate about what they do,” he said.

Okta adds new no-code workflows that use identity to trigger sales and marketing tasks

Powered by WPeMatico

Automattic acquires analytics company Parse.ly

Published February 8, 2021

Automattic, the for-profit company tied to open-source web publishing platform WordPress, is announcing that it has acquired analytics provider Parse.ly.

Specifically, Parse.ly is now part of WPVIP, the organization within Automattic that offers enterprise hosting and support to publishers, including TechCrunch. (We use Parse.ly, too.)

WPVIP CEO Nick Gernert described this as the organization’s first large enterprise software acquisition, reflecting a strategy that has expanded beyond news and media organizations — businesses like Salesforce (whose venture arm invested $300 million in Automattic back in 2019), the NBA, Condé Nast, Facebook and Microsoft now use WPVIP for their content and marketing needs.

Both companies, Gernert said, come from similar backgrounds, with “roots” in digital publishing and a “heavy focus on understanding the impact of content.”

“We’ve really started to shift more towards content marketing and starting to think more deeply beyond just what traditional page analytics provide,” he continued. That means doing more than measuring pageviews and time on site and “really starting to look more deeply at things like conversation, attribution, areas … that from a marketer’s perspective are impactful.”

WordPress and Parse.ly already work well together, but the plan is to make WPVIP features available to Parse.ly customers while also making more Parse.ly data available to WPVIP publishers. And Gernert said there are also opportunities to add more commerce-related data to Parse.ly, since Automattic also owns WooCommerce.

Parse.ly’s new feature helps writers find topics that are (relatively) under-covered

The goal, he said, is to “make Parse.ly better for WordPress and best for WPVIP.”

At the same time, he added, “There’s no plans here to make Parse.ly the only analytics solution that runs on our platform. We want to preserve the flexibility and interoperability [of WordPress], and we want to make sure from a Parse.ly perspective that it still exists as a standalone product. That’s key to its future and we will continue to invest in it.”

Parse.ly was founded in 2009 and has raised $12.9 million in funding from investors including Grotech Ventures and Blumberg Capital, according to Crunchbase. Parse.ly founders Sachin Kamdar and Andrew Montalenti are joining WPVIP, with Kamdar leading go-to-market strategy for Parse.ly and Montalenti leading product.

“We’ve always had deep admiration for WPVIP’s market position as the gold standard for enterprise content teams, and we’re thrilled to be able to join together,” Kamdar said in a statement. “From the culture and people, to the product, market and vision, we’re in lockstep to create more value for our customers. This powerful combination of content and intelligence will push the industry forward at an accelerated pace.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

How Automattic wants to build the operating system of the web

Powered by WPeMatico

Nexthink nabs $180M Series D on $1.1B valuation

Published February 8, 2021

We often hear about companies working to improve the customer experience, but for IT their customers are the company’s employees. Nexthink, a late-stage startup that wants to help IT serve its internal constituents better, announced a $180 million Series D today on a healthy $1.1 billion valuation.

The firm, which was founded in Lausanne, Switzerland and has offices outside of Boston, received funding from Permira with help from Highland Europe and Index Ventures. The company has now raised more than $336 million, according to Crunchbase data.

As you might imagine, understanding how folks are using a company’s technology choices internally is always going to be useful, but when the pandemic hit and offices closed, having access to this type of data became even more important.

Customer experience and digital transformation concepts are merging during the pandemic

Nexthink CEO and co-founder Pedro Bados says that most monitoring tools are focused on figuring out if the systems are working correctly and finding ways to fix them. Nexthink takes a different approach, looking at how employees are adopting the tools a company is offering.

“What we do at Nexthink is to take the [monitoring] problem from a completely different perspective. We say that we’re going to give your IT department a real-time understanding of how employees are experiencing IT [at your company],” Bados told me.

He says they do this by looking at the problem from the employees’ perspective. “At the end of the day we’re giving all the insights to IT departments to make sure they can improve the digital experience of their employees,” he said.

This could involve querying the user base in the same way that HR and marketing survey tools allow companies to check the pulse of employees or customers. By gathering this type of data, it helps IT understand how employees are using the company’s technology choices.

This software is aimed at larger organizations with at least 5,000 employees. Today, the company has more than 1,000 of these customers, including Best Buy, Fidelity, Liberty Mutual and 3M. What’s more, the company has surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, a success benchmark for SaaS companies like Nexthink.

One final $100M ARR company and the startups we want to meet in 2021

Nexthink currently has 700 employees with plans to reach 900 by the end of this year, and as a maturing startup, Bados has given a lot of thought on how to build a diverse workforce. Just being spread out in two countries gives an element of geographic diversity, but he says it takes more than that, and it all starts with recruitment.

“The way to make sure we get more diversity is we look at recruitment and make sure that we have a balanced pipeline. That’s something we measure as a company,” he said. They also have a diversity committee, which is charged with delivering diversity training and figuring out ways to hire a more diverse and inclusive workforce.

While the company has a healthy valuation and a good amount of money in the bank, Bados doesn’t see an IPO for at least a couple of years. He says he wants to double or triple the business before taking that step. For now, though, with $180 million in additional runway and a $100 million in ARR, the company is well-positioned for whatever future moves it chooses to make.

Nexthink raises $85M to monitor and improve ’employee experience’ of apps

Powered by WPeMatico

Here’s how Elon Musk’s $100 million Xprize competition for carbon removal will work

Published February 8, 2021

Elon Musk notified the world that he would be donating $100 million to pursue new technologies for carbon capture, methods through which carbon dioxide can be actively extracted from the atmosphere as a means to help stave off climate change. As TechCrunch reported in January when he made the tweet, Musk’s sizeable pool of monetary incentive would be going to the Xprize foundation, a nonprofit that has organized similar ambitious technology competitions aimed at developing world-changing tech. Now, Xprize and Musk have released new details of the competition.

The entire $100 million prize pool is up for grabs with this competition, which will seek solutions that can “pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans and lock it away permanently in an environmentally benign way.” That’s an ambitious goal, and one that seeks methods for carbon extraction which have a net negative effect on the overall global balance of the element’s presence. Xprize aims to award up to 15 finalists $1 million each, along with three top winners, with $50 million to the Grand Prize victor, and $20 million and $10 million respectively for second and third place. Twenty-five student scholarships valued at $250,000 each will also be up for grabs specifically for student team entrants.

To qualify for victory, solutions must be able to extract one ton of CO2 per day, and be viable in a scaled, validated model at time of presentation, with the ability to scale it to “gigaton levels” in commercially viable ways in the future. Those are big goals for new technologies, but the competition’s stakes are high: Musk has frequently referred to climate change as an existential threat to humanity, and carbon capture is one key means to combat it.

Elon Musk is donating $100M to find the best carbon capture technology

Carbon capture methods exist, and some are at the center of new startups and emerging businesses, like Canadian company Carbon Engineering, which uses CO2 extracted from the atmosphere to create new types of fuel, or Air Vodka, a carbon negative vodka distilled using C02 removed from the atmosphere. Though there are a handful of companies pursuing this, the problem is that it’s typically very expensive to remove carbon in a way that is both safe and that has no subsequent impact on the environment from its resulting byproducts.

The new Xprize competition hopes to spur the development of a wide range of emerging companies in a way similar to how the 2004 $10 million private spaceflight Ansari Xprize led the development of a whole new era in the space industry. The competition will officially begin on April 22, 2021, at which time full guidelines will be made available and registration will open. Applicants will have up to four years to submit their solution, with the competition closing on Earth Day 2025 and the initial $1 million awards distributed 18 months following that. That will provide the funding necessary for teams to build out their full-scale demos to claim the top prizes.

Powered by WPeMatico

1 … 223 224 225 226 227 … 2,385