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Cockroach Labs scores $160M Series E on $2B valuation

Published January 12, 2021

Cockroach Labs, makers of CockroachDB, have been on a fundraising roll for the last couple of years. Today the company announced a $160 million Series E on a fat $2 billion valuation. The round comes just eight months after the startup raised an $86.6 million Series D.

The latest investment was led by Altimeter Capital, with participation from new investors Greenoaks and Lone Pine, along with existing investors Benchmark, Bond, FirstMark, GV, Index Ventures and Tiger Global. The round doubled the company’s previous valuation and increased the amount raised to $355 million.

Co-founder and CEO Spencer Kimball says the company’s revenue more than doubled in 2020 in spite of COVID, and that caught the attention of investors. He attributed this paradoxical rise to the rapid shift to the cloud brought on by the pandemic that many people in the industry have seen.

“People became more aggressive with what was already underway, a real move to embrace the cloud to build the next generation of applications and services, and that’s really fundamentally where we are,” Kimball told me.

As that happened, the company began a shift in thinking. While it has embraced an open-source version of CockroachDB along with a 30-day free trial on the company’s cloud service as ways to attract new customers to the top of the funnel, it wants to try a new approach.

In fact, it plans to replace the 30-day trial with a newer version later this year without any time limits. It believes this will attract more developers to the platform and enable them to see the full set of features without having to enter credit card information. What’s more, by taking this approach, it should end up costing the company less money to support the free tier.

“What we expect is that you can do all kinds of things on that free tier. You can do a hackathon, any kind of hobby project […] or even a startup that has ambitions to be the next DoorDash or Airbnb,” he said. As he points out, there’s a point where early-stage companies don’t have many users, and can remain in the free tier until they achieve product-market fit.

“That’s when they put a credit card down, and they can extend beyond the free tier threshold and pay for what they use,” he said. The newer free tier is still in the beta testing phase, but will be rolled out during this year.

Kimball says the company wasn’t necessarily looking to raise, although he knew that it would continue to need more cash on the balance sheet to run with giant competitors like Oracle, AWS and the other big cloud vendors, along with a slew of other database startups. As the company’s revenue grows, he certainly sees an IPO in its future, but he doesn’t see it happening this year.

Cockroach Labs launches CockroachDB as managed service

The startup ended the year with 200 employees and Kimball expects to double that by the end of this year. He says growing a diverse group of employees takes good internal data and building a welcoming and inclusive culture.

“I think the starting point for anything you want to optimize in a business is to make sure that you have the metrics in front of you, and that you’re constantly looking at them […] in order to measure how you’re doing,” he explained.

He added, “The thing that we’re most focused on in terms of action is really building the culture of the company appropriately and that’s something we’ve been doing for all six years we’ve been around. To the extent that you have an inclusive environment where people actually really view the value of respect, that helps with diversity.”

Kimball says he sees a different approach to running the business when the pandemic ends, with some small percentage going into the office regularly and others coming for quarterly visits, but he doesn’t see a full return to the office post-pandemic.

Cockroach Labs scores $86.6M Series D as scalable database resonates

Yelp will show user feedback about businesses’ health and safety practices

Published January 12, 2021

Moving forward, Yelp users won’t just be asked whether a business has good food or accepts credit cards — the platform is also allowing them to share feedback on whether the staff is wearing masks and enforcing social distancing.

Yelp’s head of consumer product, Akhil Kuduvalli Ramesh, suggested that this is the next phase of how the company is trying to help local businesses, after allowing them to highlight virtual services, manage their waitlists in accordance with new regulations and indicate the health and safety measures that they’re taking.

Of course, it’s one thing to see that a business claims to have strict mask-wearing and social distancing procedures, and another to hear other customers confirm that it’s true (or not). So Ramesh said it’s less about warning users away from certain businesses and more working “to continue to instill confidence in consumers to continue to connect with and support local businesses.”

When users visit a business profile they’ll now be asked whether social distancing was enforced and whether the staff wore masks — Ramesh said other health and safety questions could be added in the future (and users can offer slightly more detailed feedback on safety measures by hitting the Edit button in a profile), but those are the ones that users seem to care about most.

Image Credits: Yelp

When Yelp receives enough answers to offer present meaningful data (the company, understandably, isn’t disclosing the exact threshold), it will add a message in the health and safety section of the profile: “Social distancing enforced according to most users” with a green checkmark, or “Social distancing might not be enforced according to most users” with an orange question mark, with similar messages for mask-wearing.

Yelp is making it easier for businesses to highlight their virtual services

In cases where the responses are mixed, but there’s still “significant” feedback indicating that these practices aren’t followed, the message will be attributed to “some users” instead.

Ramesh said that Yelp has already been collecting this user feedback, and at launch, only “a couple hundred” of the millions of businesses on Yelp will be marked with an orange label, “which also means that many businesses are doing the right thing.”

Image Credits: Yelp

He noted that in cases of multi-location businesses, the health and safety data will be specific to each location. Also, the labels will be based on feedback from the past 28 days — so if a business gets an orange label but starts doing better, their profile should eventually be updated to reflect that.

In addition, Yelp says it’s adding new service offerings and safety measures that businesses can include on their profiles, including checking staff for symptoms, disposable or contactless menus, heated outdoor seating and covered outdoor seating.

Yelp adds new features for reopening businesses

Content discovery platform Dable closes $12 million Series C at $90 million valuation to accelerate its global expansion

Published January 12, 2021

Launched in South Korea five years ago, content discovery platform Dable now serves a total of six markets in Asia. Now it plans to speed up the pace of its expansion, with six new markets in the region planned for this year, before entering European countries and the United States. Dable announced today that it has raised a $12 million Series C at a valuation of $90 million, led by South Korean venture capital firm SV Investment. Other participants included KB Investment and K2 Investment, as well as returning investor Kakao Ventures, a subsidiary of Kakao Corporation, one of South Korea’s largest internet firms.

Dable (the name is a combination of “data” and “able”) currently serves more than 2,500 media outlets in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia. It has subsidiaries in Taiwan, which accounts for 70% of its overseas sales, and Indonesia.

The Series C brings Dable’s total funding so far to $20.5 million. So far, the company has taken a gradual approach to international expansion, co-founder and chief executive officer Chaehyun Lee told TechCrunch, first entering one or two markets and then waiting for business there to stabilize. In 2021, however, it plans to use its Series C to speed up the pace of its expansion, launching in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, mainland China, Australia and Turkey before entering markets in Europe and the United States, too.

The company’s goal is to become the “most utilized personalized recommendation platform in at last 30 countries by 2024.” Lee said it also has plans to transform into a media tech company by launching a content management system (CMS) next year.

Dable currently claims an average annual sales growth rate since founding of more than 50%, and says it reached $27.5 million in sales in 2020, up from 63% the previous year. Each month, it has a total of 540 million unique users and recommends five billion pieces of content, resulting in more than 100 million clicks. Dable also says its average annual sales growth rate since founding is more than 50%, and in that 2020, it reached $27.5 million in sales, up 63% from the previous year.

Before launching Dable, Lee and three other members of its founding team worked at RecoPick, a recommendation engine developer operated by SK Telecom subsidiary SK Planet. For media outlets, Dable offers two big data and machine learning-based products: Dable News to make personalized recommendations of content, including articles, to visitors, and Dable Native Ad, which draws on ad networks including Google, MSN and Kakao.

A third product, called karamel.ai, is an ad-targeting solution for e-commerce platforms that also makes personalized product recommendations.

Taboola and Outbrain call off their $850M merger

Dable’s main rivals include Taboola and Outbrain, both of which are headquartered in New York (and recently called off a merger), but also do business in Asian markets, and Tokyo-based Popin, which also serves clients in Japan and Taiwan.

Lee said Dable proves the competitiveness of its products by running A/B tests to compare the performance of competitors against Dable’s recommendations and see which one results in the most clickthroughs. It also does A/B testing to compare the performance of articles picked by editors against ones that were recommended by Dable’s algorithms.

Dable also provides algorithms that allow clients more flexibility in what kind of personalized content they display, which is a selling point as media companies try to recover from the massive drop in ad spending precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Dable’s Related Articles algorithm is based on content that visitors have already viewed, while its Perused Article algorithm gauges how interested visitors are in certain articles based on metrics like how much time they spent reading them. It also has another algorithm that displays the most viewed articles based on gender and age groups.

How will digital media survive the ad crash?

YouTube and WhatsApp inch closer to half a billion users in India

Published January 11, 2021

WhatsApp has enjoyed unrivaled reach in India for years. By mid-2019, the Facebook-owned app had amassed over 400 million users in the country. Its closest app rival at the time was YouTube, which, according to the company’s own statement and data from mobile insight firm App Annie, had about 260 million users in India then.

Things have changed dramatically since.

In the month of December, YouTube had 425 million monthly active users on Android phones and tablets in India, according to App Annie, the data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch. In comparison, WhatsApp had 422 million monthly active users on Android in India last month.

Factoring in the traction both these apps have garnered on iOS devices, WhatsApp still assumes a lead in India with 459 million active users¹, but YouTube is not too far behind with 452 million users.

With China keeping its doors closed to U.S. tech giants, India emerged as the top market for Silicon Valley and Chinese companies looking to continue their growth in the last decade. India had about 50 million internet users in 2010, but it ended the decade with more than 600 million. Google and Facebook played their part to make this happen.

In the last four years, both Google and Facebook have invested in ways to bring the internet to people who are offline in India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people. Google kickstarted a project to bring Wi-Fi to 400 railway stations in the country and planned to extend this program to other public places. Facebook launched Free Basics in India, and then — after the program was banned in the country — it launched Express Wi-Fi.

Both Google and Facebook, which identify India as their biggest market by users, have scaled down on their connectivity efforts in recent years after India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, took it upon himself to bring the country online. After he succeeded, both the companies bought multibillion-dollar stakes in his firm, Jio Platforms, which has amassed over 400 million subscribers.

Jio Platforms’ cut-rate mobile data tariff has allowed hundreds of millions of people in India, where much of the online user base was previously too conscious about how much data they spent on the internet, to consume, worry-free, hours of content on YouTube and other video platforms in recent years. This growth might explain why Google is doubling down on short-video apps.

The new figures shared with TechCrunch illustrate a number of other findings about the Indian market. Even as WhatsApp’s growth has slowed² in India, it continues to enjoy an unprecedented loyalty among its users.

More than 95% of WhatsApp’s monthly active users in India use the app each day, and nearly its entire user base checks the app at least once a week. In comparison, three-fourths of YouTube’s monthly active users in India are also its daily active users.

The data also showed that Google’s eponymous app as well as Chrome — both of which, like YouTube, ship pre-installed³ on most Android smartphones — has also surpassed over 400 million monthly active users in India in recent months. Facebook’s app, in comparison, had about 325 million monthly active users in India last month.

When asked for comment, a Google spokesperson pointed TechCrunch to a report from Comscore last year, which estimated that YouTube had about 325 million monthly unique users in India in May 2020.

A separate report by research firm Media Partners Asia on Monday estimated that YouTube commanded 43% of the revenue generated in the online video market in India last year (about $1.4 billion). Disney+ Hotstar assumed 16% of the market, while Netflix had 14%.

Google invests in Indian startups Glance and DailyHunt

^{1 For simplicity, I have not factored in the traction WhatsApp Business and YouTube Kids apps have received in India. WhatsApp and YouTube also maintain apps on KaiOS, which powers JioPhone feature handsets in India. At last count — which was a long time ago — more than 40 million JioPhone handsets had shipped in India. TechCrunch could not determine the inroads any app has made on this platform. Additionally, the figures of YouTube on Android (phones and tablets) and iOS (iPhone and iPad) will likely have an overlap. The same is not true of WhatsApp, which restricts one phone number to one account. So if I have WhatsApp installed on an iPhone with my primary phone number, I can’t use WhatsApp with the same number on an Android phone — at least not concurrently.}

^{2 WhatsApp Business appears to be growing fine, having amassed over 50 million users in India. And some caveats from No. 1 also apply here.}

^{3 Users still have to engage with the app for App Annie and other mobile insight firms to count them as active. So while pre-installing the app provides Google an unprecedented distribution, their apps still have to win over users.}

Flexible VC: A new model for startups targeting profitability

Published January 11, 2021

David Teten
Contributor

David Teten is founder of Versatile VC and writes periodically at teten.com and @dteten.

Flexible VC 101: Equity meets revenue share

This is currently the most common investment structure: The flexible VC investor purchases either equity ownership, or a convertible right to equity, and a right to regularly scheduled payments based on a percentage of revenues.

By tying payments to actual revenues, founders and investors remain aligned around the company’s real-time performance, good or bad.

“Too often, investment structures force the management team to make decisions between misaligned growth and investment (return) objectives. This structure allows for alignment on the front end, and real-time flexibility for performance metrics,” says Samira Salman, a family office investor and advisor.

Payments are commonly delayed for a grace period of 12-36 months. John Berger, director of Operations and Impact Solutions at Toniic, observed that this has clear investor benefits: “The grace period became a feature because it benefits investors in regions like the U.S. where there can be tax differences between short- and long-term gains. It has moved from its origins as a tax benefit and can be viewed as a feature that benefits founders.” After the grace period, the return payments begin, often lasting until a return cap is hit, such as 2-5 times the original investment.

To account for these revenue share payments, the investor’s ownership (or convertible right to ownership) is simultaneously reduced. Once the return cap is reached, the investor is typically left with a residual stake — a fraction of the pre-revenue share ownership. At any point, should the founder wish to pursue a traditional equity VC round, or get bought, the revenue share is paused, and the investor’s then-current ownership converts to equate to a traditional equity VC investor.

Flexible VC 102: Variations

Flexible VCs have created structures based on other company performance metrics than revenues, such as profits or founder salaries. These different company performance metrics provide a slight variation in how the investor and founder relationship is defined. For example, profit-sharing structures ensure payments do not begin until the company is profitable, though likely delaying returns to the investor and complicating payment calculations.

Similarly, when flexible VC structures are based off of the founder’s own compensation (often via salary or dividends), investors are specifically tying their returns to the financial success of the founder. This translates less directly to company performance compared to a revenue or profit share, but offers uniquely personal alignment. These variations in founder alignment allow flexible VCs to specialize in the types of companies they work with.

The state of flexible VC

In all these cases, capital is provided to fuel forecasted growth without creating a commitment to a particular vision for future funding rounds, exit goals and associated blitzscaling. The founder retains full control over whether they want to optimize for hypergrowth (usually at the expense of profitability) or for organic, profitable growth. Flexible VC opens up a new risk capital option for bootstrappers, minorities, family-owned and countless other founder segments left out by the traditional funding landscape.

A range of small VCs are deploying with flexible VC structures, but we believe the total amount of AUM deployed with this strategy is well under $50 million. Similar to the explosion of seed funds in the past decade, we (and some limited partners too) believe these Flexible VCs are on the forefront of what will become a major segment of the venture ecosystem.

We detail below the major categories of VC:

Funder category	Equity ownership	Returns primarily based on	Composition of returns	Example VC
Equity VC	Yes, typically preferred equity. 15%-20% sold per round. On average, founders own just 43% of equity by Series B, declining thereafter.	The value ascribed by subsequent investors (in a secondary); buyers (acquisition); or the public markets (IPO).	Volatile, uncapped.	Andressen Horowitz, ff Venture Capital, HOF Capital, Sequoia.
Flexible VC: Revenue-based	Yes, nonvoting common shares (if converted). 5%-20% initial stake, with 50%-90% of this redeemable.	Gross revenues (generally 2%-8%).	2x-5x return cap + path to uncapped equity returns.	Capacity Capital, Greater Colorado Venture Fund, Indie.VC, Reformation Partners, UP Fund, Versatile VC.
Flexible VC: Compensation-based	Yes, via conversion rights at a valuation cap.	“Founder earnings” (Founder salaries + dividends + retained earnings).	2x-5x return cap + path to uncapped equity returns.	Chisos.
Flexible VC: Blended Return	Yes, via conversion rights at a valuation cap.	Profits, founder salaries, and/or dividends declared.	Typically ~3x+ return cap + path to uncapped equity returns. Discretionary dividends and salary share built in.	Collab Capital, Earnest Capital, TinySeed.
Revenue-share investing	No.	Gross revenues (generally 2%-8%).	1.35x-2.2x return cap.	Novel Growth Partners, Lighter Capital, Rev Up, Corl.

Flexible VC versus other venture capital models

Flexible VC investors offer founders some of the same advantages as equity VCs:

Aligned incentives. Whether it is a breakout success or complete failure and loss of capital, investors are along for the ride. When the company hits potholes, flexible VC investors usually don’t have the nuclear options of firing management and/or doing a recapitalization. Their only option is to work with management to try to fix the problems.
Few strings attached. Founders have autonomy to spend the funds in whatever way they like.
Long-term alignment. Many flexible VCs retain a small residual stake in the company after the return cap is reached, driving alignment well beyond the horizon of the revenue share, similar to the long-term orientation of equity VC.
Seed-stage compatible. Like traditional equity VC investors, flexible VCs accommodate early-stage investment risk within their portfolios better than a traditional RBI funder.
Eligible for favorable treatment under qualified small business stock exemption, if structured as equity. This applies if the investment converts into common stock; details are beyond this essay’s scope.

Flexible VCs also offer investors some of the same advantages as RBI:

Clear return expectations. The return cap is a stated multiple of the investment, typically 2x-5x.
Early liquidity. Equity VC is a “get rich slow” business. Flexible VC creates early liquidity that can be either reinvested or distributed to LPs.
Improved financial management. All parties want the company to be able to afford the payment obligations and, ideally, deliver a quick return. As a result, unfounded hockey-stick graphs and unicorn promises give way to financial fluency, realistic expectations, frank conversations about what a business can credibly achieve and transparency.
Profitability is prioritized. The revenue that is going to grow the company immediately is the same revenue that is going to get investors to their return cap. If the company is profitable, the revenue share becomes increasingly affordable. This drives an earlier focus on profitability than is typical for a company backed by traditional equity VC.
Founder retains control. Flexible VCs typically purchase nonvoting common stock, if they purchase stock (one even assigns their voting rights to the founders). This keeps the founder in the driver’s seat of the company.
Attractive to women and underrepresented founders. See Why Are Revenue-Based Investors Investing in Women & Diverse Entrepreneurs?

Flexible VC also offers some unique advantages:

Straightforward equity interface. If an equity round is needed to fund breakout growth beyond what the flexible VC funds, the mechanics of including a flexible VC in an equity VC round are predetermined and simple.
Prepared for blitzscaling, but neither required nor expected. Blitzscaling typically means prioritizing user growth over revenue growth and revenue growth over profitability. Tim O’Reilly, CEO, O’Reilly Media, argues, “Blitzscaling isn’t really a recipe for success but rather survivorship bias masquerading as a strategy.” With flexible VC, not every company is expected to achieve breakout growth, but that possibility is accounted for up front.
Particular application in impact capital. Our research has found that impact investors appear to be particularly interested in flexible VC. An impact investor typically needs some economic return to function, but doesn’t necessarily want the company as a whole to exit, given exits often have a negative impact on the company’s founding mission. Flexible VC allows impact VCs to thread this needle.

That said, nothing is cost-free. The unique disadvantages of flexible VC include:

Sneaker enthusiast group SoleSavy raises $2M, setting the stage for a community-driven commerce boom

Published January 11, 2021

SoleSavy, a community built around buying hot sneakers and related items that are increasingly hard to acquire at retail, raised $2 million in a round that closed late last year. SoleSavy is a group of communities that is currently mostly hosted on Slack.

SoleSavy’s co-founders Dejan Pralica and Justin Dusanj founded the company in 2018 as a paid community for collectors and enthusiasts seeking pairs that were getting snapped up by bots or resellers. Pralica previously co-founded Kicks Deals, a sneaker shipping site focused on less than retail pricing and Dusanj is the former director of Operations at New Age Sports, a Nike retailer.

SoleSavy’s $2 million party raise includes investment from Panache Ventures, Jason Calacanis’ LAUNCH, Turner Novak, Ben Narasin, Morning Brew’s Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief, Tiny Capital, Wesley Pentz (yes, Diplo), Matthew Hauri aka Yung Gravy, Ryan Holmes, Roham Gharegozlou and Bedrock Capital.

SoleSavy has built an engaged community (several communities, really) around the ebb and flow of the sneakerhead consumer universe (SCU). I just coined that, by the way, please make it a thing. The SCU is an interesting place filled with fascinating characters and behaviors. Every once in a while it pokes its head into the mainstream, whether via a documentary, a hot shoe release or a strong-arm robbery attempt. In 2021, I believe that we will see more of this world breaking out of its box into the larger consumer consciousness.

The trends that are leading us to this place are varied, but some of them have been front and center during the pandemic, as a decade’s worth of consumer behavioral change has occurred in the space of a few months. You only have to look at how hard it was to get a PS5 or Xbox One X or a GPU for the holiday season, and how many services, Twitter accounts and monitor groups rose up to try to help people do that to see what the future of shopping looks like.

I joked about not being able to buy butter without a bot, but it’s not far from the truth — nearly every category of goods has had its own shortages over the last year. But the mother of all limited goods category for decades now has been sneakers.

Every release is hotly anticipated and eagerly purchased by people looking for the latest shoe. The massive increase in interest in the sneaker as the marquee desirable item and the unwillingness of the biggest manufacturers to lose the hype halo has led to each drop being harder to get than the last. Second-market startups like StockX and GOAT have sprung up to facilitate those who don’t mind paying 30%-200% premiums on each release.

The solution for many lies in the countless “cook groups” that help buyers anticipate demand and stock for each drop and plan to purchase them on release date.

SoleSavy’s function is ostensibly to do just that: help regular enthusiasts to strategize and execute the release-day cop. But beyond that, Pralica says that the group has come to be about the community of people around those shoes more than the purchase itself.

Image Credits: SoleSavy

SoleSavy is at its heart a Slack group (a series of groups actually that act as cohorts, leading people through the tiers of community that the team has built) with rooms that help people to understand what’s happening in sneakers, get the releases and commiserate around the culture. Pralica says that they’ve built that community out slowly (the waitlist for the group grows by 400 people per day) in order to maintain a positive atmosphere and to properly onboard new people to the group. They also have an app that drives push notifications and a podcast.

That positive community vibe is what Pralica says is SoleSavy’s long-term focus and differentiating factor that keeps the 4,000 members across the U.S. and Canada interacting with the group on a nearly daily basis.

I’ve been in a dozen or so different groups focused on buying large quantities of each release to re-sell over the years and many of them are, at best, rowdy and at worst toxic. That’s an environment that SoleSavy wanted to stay away from, says Pralica. Instead, SoleSavy tries to court those who want to buy and wear the shoes, trade them and yes, maybe even resell personal pairs eventually to obtain and wear another grail.

Though cook groups have been the “core” of the Discord and Slack-based communities in the sneaker world, other iterations have been booming too. Entrepreneurial communities based in the same hustle principles like Tyler Blake’s In This Economy and fanbase-focused groups around popular streamers top the Disboard. And bets on social token outfits like Zora are also focused on community as the glue that holds together a user base.

Crypto-driven marketplace Zora raises $2M to build a sustainable creator economy

Community is the future of all commerce, whether you’re looking for a specific product (see the huge PS5 monitors) or want to steep yourself in a particular universe of product interest (the SCU). The trends that I’ve been seeing all point to 2021 being the year that community-driven purchasing breaks out of the underbelly of fandom and becomes officially “a thing.”

Image Credits: SoleSavy

SoleSavy has been experimenting with a variety of ways to keep the community knit going, including live chats, get-togethers and even a handsome custom community-designed Jordan 1. These efforts have driven the previously bootstrapped company to some impressive early numbers. Pralica says that SoleSavy is currently profitable, with $1.5 million ARR on $33 monthly subscriptions plus affiliate revenue and that their DAUs are at 90% — an engagement number that would make any retailer salivate.

Though the funding closed (very) late last year I thought that this would be a great kick-off story for the year ahead. Though SoleSavy seems to have a really compelling story and a great growth curve, I think they’re at the tip of a very large trend, one that we will see continue to build throughout the year.

Snap acquires location data startup StreetCred

Published January 11, 2021

Snapchat’s parent company Snap has acquired StreetCred, a New York City startup building a platform for location data.

Snap confirmed the news to TechCrunch and said the acquisition will result in four StreetCred team members — including co-founders Randy Meech and Diana Shkolnikov — joining the company, where they’ll be working on map and location-related products.

A big component of that strategy is the Snap Map, which allows users to view public snaps from a given area and to share their location with friends. Last summer, the Snap Map was added to Snapchat’s main navigation bar, and the company announced that the product was reaching 200 million users every month.

At the same time, Snapchat has been adding other products that tie into a user’s locations, such as Local Lenses, which allow developers to create geography-specific augmented reality lenses that interact with physical locations.

StreetCred is building a blockchain-based marketplace for location data

Meech and Shkolnikov should be bringing plenty of mapping experience to Snap — Meech was formerly CEO at Samsung’s open mapping subsidiary Mapzen, and before that the senior vice president of local and mapping products at TechCrunch’s parent company AOL (subsequently rebranded as Verizon Media). Shkolnikov, meanwhile, is the former engineering director at Mapzen.

StreetCred had raised $1 million in seed funding from Bowery Capital and Notation Capital. When I spoke to Meech in 2018, he said his goal was to “open up and decentralize” location data by building a blockchain-based marketplace where users are rewarded for helping to collect that data.

While the financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, the existing StreetCred platform will be shut down as part of the deal.

Snapchat boosts its AR platform with voice search, Local Lenses and SnapML

Samsung’s upcycling program is designed to give new life to old tech

Published January 11, 2021

In the world of annual refresh cycles, there’s always been a big question mark around what to do with all of the old tech we too readily abandon. There are a number of options for disposing and recycling these objects that often contain rare earth and sometimes harmful material. The concept of upcycling has also become an increasingly popular option — offering a new lease on life for old technology. After all, your three-year-old smartphone may not be the latest and greatest, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily worthless.

During this morning’s CES kickoff press conference, Samsung outlined its new Galaxy Upcycling at Home program. For now, we got some pretty broad strokes about the program — and we’ll likely get more information at this Friday’s Galaxy Unpacked event. Here’s what the company had to say: “The new program reimagines the lifecycle of an older Galaxy phone and offers consumers options on how they might be able to repurpose their device to create a variety of convenient IoT tools.”

Recycling startup Redwood Materials is now accepting your old smartphones

Examples from the presser include a baby monitor, pet-care sensor for turning on lights remotely and a more abstract “digitally safe home” using Samsung Knox. It will be interesting to see what else the company’s got in store on that front — and certainly there’s something to be said for keeping old tech relevant even after its planned obsolescence.

The other piece of the puzzle is one of the more fun initiatives the company has introduced in recent years, with boxes that can be converted into household objects. The company announced this morning that all of its QLED, UHD TV and audio projects will feature the packaging.

Per Samsung:

As part of an ongoing commitment to eco-consciousness, Samsung is creating products and solutions with sustainability at the core. For example, Samsung’s new Solar Cell Remote Control—made in part with recycled plastic—can be charged via solar or indoor lighting, reducing battery waste.

Samsung’s new ‘eco’ TV packing transforms into cat houses, shelves and magazine racks

Holographic startup Envisics partners with Panasonic to fast-track in-car AR tech

Published January 8, 2021

Envisics founder and CEO Dr. Jamieson Christmas launched the startup three years ago to “revolutionize” the in-car experience with its holographic technology. Now, it has a partner that could help it achieve that mission.

The U.K.-based holographic technology startup said Friday it reached an agreement with Panasonic Automotive Systems to jointly develop and commercialize a new generation of head-up displays for cars, trucks and SUVs. Panasonic Automotive Systems is a Tier 1 automotive supplier and a division of Panasonic Corporation of North America. The head-up displays are units integrated in the dash of a vehicle that project images onto the windshield to aid drivers with navigation and provide other alerts. The Panasonic HUDs, as they’re often called, will use Envisics holographic technology.

The deal, announced ahead of the virtual 2021 CES tech trade show, follows Envisics’ $50 million Series B funding round and news that its tech will be integrated in the upcoming Cadillac Lyriq electric vehicle. The funding round, which brought Envisics a valuation of more than $250 million, included investments from Hyundai Mobis, GM Ventures, SAIC Ventures and Van Tuyl Companies.

Envisics’ technology, the foundation of which came out of Christmas’ PhD studies at Cambridge University more than 15 years ago, electronically manipulates the speed of light. This process enables images to appear three-dimensional, Christmas explained in a recent interview. The company has secured more than 250 patents and has another 160 pending certification.

The company is solely focused upon the automotive application of holography, Christmas said, adding that its first generation is already integrated in more than 150,000 Jaguar Land Rover vehicles.

Christmas said this new agreement aims to combine Panasonic’s expertise in optical design and its global reach as a Tier 1 supplier with Envisics’ technology to bring holography into the mainstream. Mass production of vehicles using its technology is slated for 2023, according to the companies.

“This is very much about part of our business plan, you know the Series B funding round we undertook was about scaling the business and enabling us to move forward as we enter the market,” Christmas said. “Part of that was a commitment to engage in partnerships with Tier ones that we can then work with to deliver these products to market.

“This is the first of those agreements,” he added, suggesting that Envisics has a much larger aim.

What that means, Christmas said, will be head-up displays with high resolution, wide color gamut and large images that can be overlaid upon reality. The technology can also project information at multiple distances simultaneously.

“That really unlocks very interesting applications,” he said. “In the short term, it will be kind of relatively simple augmented reality applications like navigation, highlighting the lane you’re supposed to be in and some safety applications. But as you look forward into things like autonomous driving it unlocks a whole realm of other opportunities like entertainment and video conferencing.”

He added that it could even be used for night vision applications such as overlaying enhanced information upon a dark road to make it clear where the road is going and what obstacles might be out there.

Envisics nabs $50M for its in-car holographic display tech at a $250M+ valuation

Daily Crunch: Roku buys Quibi’s content library

Published January 8, 2021

Quibi’s content will live on, Hyundai may partner with Apple and Donald Trump returns to Twitter. This is your Daily Crunch for January 8, 2021.

The big story: Roku buys Quibi’s content library

If you’re wondering what will happen to Quibi shows like “Most Dangerous Game” and “Chrissy Court,” wonder no longer: They’re going to Roku.

The streaming TV platform announced today that it has acquired the global rights to Quibi’s content library, which it plans to bring to The Roku Channel, free and ad-supported, some this year. This includes “more than a dozen” shows that never got a chance to stream on Quibi before the app shut down.

“The most creative and imaginative minds in Hollywood created groundbreaking content for Quibi that exceeded our expectations,” said Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg in a statement. “We are thrilled that these stories, from the surreal to the sublime, have found a new home on The Roku Channel.”

The tech giants

Shares of Hyundai Motor Co. climb more than 20% on potential EV deal with Apple — Hyundai said discussions are still in the “early stage.”

Google’s plan to replace tracking cookies goes under UK antitrust probe — U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority said it’s investigating “suspected breaches of competition law by Google.”

Trump returns to Twitter with what sounds like a concession speech — President Trump only had to wait 12 hours before returning to his social network of choice.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Jobandtalent tops up with $108M for its ‘workforce as a service’ platform — The startup operates a dual-sided platform that connects temp workers with employers.

Detroit’s Ludlow Ventures goes for fund four — The Detroit-based seed-stage firm is in the process of closing its fourth fund of $65 million.

Jumbotail raises $14.2M for its wholesale marketplace in India — Jumbotail said it serves more than 30,000 neighborhood stores, popularly known in India as kiranas.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

VCs discuss gaming’s biggest infrastructure investment opportunities in 2021 — Investors highlighted numerous areas for new opportunity, including specialized engines, next-gen content creation platforms and tools to port desktop experiences to mobile.

What is up with Tesla’s value? — And a bunch of other stocks, for that matter.

The Roblox Gambit — So it turns out that Roblox is worth $29.5 billion.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Stolen computers are the least of the government’s security worries — The SolarWinds breach is likely to be a bigger cybersecurity threat than any computers stolen during the pro-Trump riot on Wednesday.

Five reforms necessary to create a truly cashless society — Convenience shouldn’t come at the cost of other aspects of commerce.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.