Known for its electric scooters, Gogoro moves toward its future as a mobility platform
Since the launch of its first electric scooter in 2015, Gogoro co-founder and CEO Horace Luke has frequently been asked when the startup is going to expand beyond Taiwan. In its home country, Gogoro’s two-wheel vehicles, with their distinctive swappable battery system, are now the top-selling electric scooters.
But Luke says the company has always seen itself as a platform company, with the ultimate goal of providing a turnkey solution for energy-efficient vehicles. Now with the launch of GoShare*, its new vehicle-sharing platform, and partnerships with manufacturers such as Yamaha, Gogoro is ready to go global.
Founded by Luke, HTC’s former chief innovation officer, and chief technology officer Matt Taylor in 2011, Gogoro develops most of its technology in-house, including scooter motors, telematics units, backend servers and software. GoShare’s pilot program will launch next month in Taoyuan City, where Gogoro’s research and development center is located, with the goal of expanding with partners into cities around the world over the next year, starting in Europe, Australia and Southeast Asia.
“Gogoro has always been out with a thesis that we will be a platform enabler,” Luke told Extra Crunch during an interview in the company’s Taipei City headquarters. “Now you’ve seen the transformation of the company. Doing something this big, like what Gogoro is doing, takes time.”
Since the release of Gogoro’s first Smartscooter in 2015, the company says it has become the best-selling brand of electric two-wheel vehicles in Taiwan, holding a 17 percent share of the country’s vehicle market, including gas vehicles.
Last year, the company began licensing its technology to manufacturers Yamaha, Aeon and PGO to produce scooters that run on Gogoro’s batteries and charging infrastructure. It also has a partnership with Coup, the European electric-scooter sharing startup that plans to increase its fleet to more than 5,000 scooters on the streets of Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Tübingen this year, and is seeking similar deals with other vehicle-sharing services, as well as local governments that want to reduce traffic and pollution (the GoShare pilot program is being launched in collaboration with Taoyuan City’s government).
GoShare’s platform is meant to be a “very robust and cost-effective, very worry-free solution for municipalities and entrepreneurs,” Luke says. Parts of the system can be licensed separately or packaged as a turnkey solution that can be deployed in as little as two weeks.
The company describes GoShare as a “mobility solution.” When asked if this means the platform can be used for other electric vehicles, including cars, Luke says “just think of us as batteries and a motor.”
“It’s just like computers and processing ram,” he adds. “It can be any form factor. It just happens to be that the two-wheel form factor is the one we’re working on and focusing on at the moment.”
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Huawei cuts 600 jobs from its US research wing after being blacklisted
Huawei this week cut 600 positions from its Futurewei Technologies U.S. research arm, which operates out of Silicon Valley, Chicago, Washington state and Dallas. The move, which represents 70% of the division’s 850 roles, follows the hardware giant’s blacklisting by the U.S. government.
Reuters initially reported the news via a source from the company who noted that work has been more or less nonexistent for the branch for more than two months. “On the 17th of May, Huawei asked everyone at Futurewei to upload everything to the Huawei cloud, right before the ban took effect,” the source told the agency. “After that basically Futurewei has stopped doing any work — almost stopped everything.”
Huawei has since acknowledged the move, writing, “Futurewei Technologies announces a reduction in force, directly impacting over 600 US positions.”
The research wing has played a key role in filing thousands of patents for Huawei, including ones relating to 5G. That network technology has been at the center of recent concerns in the U.S., as red flags have been raised around Huawei’s networking equipment and potential ties to the Chinese government.
Huawei’s addition to the U.S. Commerce Department’s “entity list” has already had wide-ranging impact on the company that could ultimately prove hugely detrimental, banning access to essential technologies from American companies like Google and international component makers like ARM.
Earlier this week, another report surfaced tying Huawei to North Korea’s 3G network, a move that could potentially be in violation of U.S. sanctions against the country.
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Google updates its speech tech for contact centers
Last July, Google announced its Contact Center AI product for helping businesses get more value out of their contact centers. Contact Center AI uses a mix of Google’s machine learning-powered tools to help build virtual agents and help human agents as they do their job. Today, the company is launching several updates to this product that will, among other things, bring improved speech recognition features to the product.
As Google notes, its automated speech recognition service gets to very high accuracy rates, even on the kind of noisy phone lines that many customers use to complain about their latest unplanned online purchase. To improve these numbers, Google is now launching a feature called “Auto Speech Adaptation in Dialogflow,” (with Dialogflow being Google’s tool for building conversational experiences). With this, the speech recognition tools are able to take into account the context of the conversation and hence improve their accuracy by about 40%, according to Google.
In addition, Google is launching a new phone model for understanding short utterances, which is now about 15% more accurate for U.S. English, as well as a number of other updates that improve transcription accuracy, make the training process easier and allow for endless audio streaming to the Cloud Speech-to-Text API, which previously had a five-minute limit.
If you want to, you also can now natively download MP3s of the audio (and then burn them to CDs, I guess).
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CircleCI closes $56M Series D investment as market for continuous delivery expands
CircleCI launched way back in 2011 when the notion of continuous delivery was just a twinkle in most developers’ eyes, but over the years with the rise of agile, containerization and DevOps, we’ve seen the idea of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) really begin to mainstream with developers. Today, CircleCI was rewarded with a $56 million Series D investment.
The round was led by Owl Rock Capital Partners and Next Equity. Existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Top Tier Capital, Threshold Ventures (formerly DFJ), Baseline Ventures, Industry Ventures, Heavybit and Harrison Metal Capital also participated in the round. CircleCI’s most recent funding prior to this round was a $31 million Series C last January. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $115.5 million, according to the company.
CircleCI CEO Jim Rose sees a market that’s increasingly ready for the product his company is offering. “As we’re putting more money to work, there are just more folks that are now moving away from aspiring about doing continuous delivery and really leaning into the idea of, ‘We’re a software company, we need to know how to do this well, and we need to be able to automate all the steps between the time our developers are making changes to the code until that application gets in front of the customer,’ ” Rose told TechCrunch.
Rose sees a market that’s getting ready to explode and he wants to use the runway this money provides his company to take advantage of that growth. “Now, what we’re finding is that fintech companies, insurance companies, retailers — all of the more traditional brands — are now realizing they’re in a software business as well. And they’re really trying to build out the tool sets and the expertise to be effective at that. And so the real growth in our market is still right in front of us,” he said.
As CircleCI matures and the market follows suit, a natural question following a Series D investment is when the company might go public, but Rose was not ready to commit to anything yet. “We come at it from the perspective of keeping our heads down trying to build the best business and doing right by our customers. I’m sure at some point along the journey our investors will be itching for liquidity, but as it stands right now, everyone is really [focused]. I think what we have found is that the bulk of the market is just starting to arrive,” he said.
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TwelveSouth’s StayGo is the last USB-C dock you’ll ever need
The TwelveSouth StayGo is a new USB-C dock from a company that makes a ton of great and unique Mac and iOS device accessories. True to the company’s track record, it offers a slightly different take on a popular accessory category — and ends up excelling as a result.
The StayGo’s unique twist is a short USB-C to USB-C cable that slots right into a dedicated compartment on the dock, offering portable connectivity without any awkward stubby permanently attached cord. It also avoids the problem that direct USB-C dock connectors have, where they stick out and can potentially get damaged in your bag or scratch other stuff. There’s a second, three-foot cable included in the box, too, which you can conveniently just plug into your Mac at home if you switch between a desktop and a MacBook, or a Mac and an iPad.
It seems like a pretty simple thing, but having these two cables instead of just one, and the stowable short cable, make this far more convenient for anyone who travels or who does any out-of-home work at all. I’ve used a ton of these things, and StayGo is my clear favorite after having used it on a couple of trips over a month or so of testing.
I haven’t even talked about the ports yet — TwelveSouth nailed the right mix there, too, with three high-speed USB 3.0 ports, an Ethernet port, a USB-C connector (with pass-through charging at up to 85W), a 4K 30Hz HDMI port and both SD and microSD slots (which support UHS-I transfer speeds, and which can operate simultaneously). That’s just about everything a traveler or working photographer today needs, and nothing they don’t — all in a space-saving design that never makes you choose between it and other gear when you’re packing even the smallest bag.
In terms of performance, so far it’s been rock solid. There’s nothing worse than random unmounting of memory cards when you’re trying to transfer photos from a shoot, and the StayGo is definitely able to deliver solid, uninterrupted performance there. If I had any complaints, it’s that video output isn’t 60Hz, but that’s not really a necessary requirement for something that I’ll be using primarily to supplement my external monitor needs when I’m on the road, instead of a dedicated video connection for a video editing setup, for instance.
The StayGo can get a bit warm when operating, but it’s never been actually hot, and the aluminum case construction helps ensure it can shed excess temp quickly.
At $99.99 it may be a bit more expensive than some of the hubs you can pick up on Amazon, but in terms of reliability, specs, port load out and its interesting approach to blending portability and at-home convenience, TwelveSouth is more than justified in setting that price point for the StayGo.
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Mixhalo raises $10.7M to bring better sound quality to live events
Mixhalo — the startup co-founded by Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger and his wife, violinist Ann Marie Simpson-Einziger — has raised $10.7 million in Series A funding.
The company’s initial goal was to bring better sound quality to concerts. Instead of hearing music blasted out of speakers, users can connect their smartphone to a network (the startup creates its own wireless channel that doesn’t rely on the venue’s potentially overloaded Wi-Fi or cell networks). Then, through their earbuds, they’ll hear the same sound mix that the musicians receive through their in-ear monitors.
Mixhalo launched two years ago at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, where Incubus and investor Pharrell Williams took the stage to play a couple of songs. The sound arrived loud and clear through my earbuds, and the experience didn’t feel too different from a normal concert.
Since then, Mixhalo has also been used at Y Combinator Demo Day and deployed on tours by Charlie Puth, Incubus and Metallica, as well as Aerosmith’s current Las Vegas residency.
And at the beginning of this year, Marc Ruxin joined as CEO. Ruxin previously led the music discovery startup TastemakerX (which was acquired by Rdio), so this is clearly an area that interests him, but he told me that he wasn’t actually eager to return to the music business. However, he was wowed by Mixhalo’s sound quality, and as he talked to Einziger (who serves as the startup’s chief creative officer), he became convinced that the technology could be used at a wide range of events and venues — conferences, sports, museums, megachurches and more.
Plus, unlike other music startups, Ruxin said the business model here seemed appealingly straightforward: “We sell enterprise software to event organizers.”
When I’ve described the idea in the past, there’s usually some skepticism about whether concertgoers really care that much about sound, and concern about whether wearing headphones diminishes the social experience.
Ruxin countered Mixhalo offers a number of benefits beyond sound quality — there’s the ability for each listener to control their own volume, and an opportunity to create unique experiences, like offering multiple mixes for a single concert, or watching one band at a festival (or one presenter at Demo Day) while listening to another via Mixhalo.
He also argued that people don’t realize how bad most concert audio is until Mixhalo gives the chance to experience something better.
“We’re definitely solving a problem in music that people don’t realize they have,” he said, comparing it to watching an old TV and thinking it was fine, until you had the chance to watch in HD: “Now, sports that’s not in HD looks crappy.”
As for the effect on the social experience, Ruxin said the idea isn’t to turn the whole event into a silent disco. Instead, Mixhalo allows the audience members to choose the experience they want. And that can change from song to song — he recalled seeing some fans listen to Mixhalo for most of a concert, then take their headphones off to sing along with the hits. Others did the opposite, wanting to get the best sound quality on their favorite songs.
Ruxin said he’s primarily focused on music and sports for now, but he’s also open to working with partners outside those areas, because the technology can be installed in, say, a Broadway musical with “no technical tweaks.”
The funding was led by Foundry Group, with participation from Sapphire Sport, Founders Fund, Defy Partners, Cowboy Ventures, Red Light Management, Another Planet Entertainment, Rick Farman and Rich Goodstone of Superfly and Charlie Walker of C3. Mixhalo has now raised a total of $15 million.
NEW YORK, NY – MAY 17: (L-R) Pharrell Williams, founder and CEO of MIXhalo Mike Einziger and TechCrunch senior writer Anthony Ha speak onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017 – Day 3 at Pier 36 on May 17, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
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Arrcus snags $30M Series B as it tries to disrupt networking biz
Arrcus has a bold notion to try and take on the biggest names in networking by building a better networking management system. Today it was rewarded with a $30 million Series B investment led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Existing investors General Catalyst and Clear Ventures also participated. The company previously raised a seed and Series A totaling $19 million, bringing the total raised to date to $49 million, according to numbers provided by the company.
Founder and CEO Devesh Garg says the company wanted to create a product that would transform the networking industry, which has traditionally been controlled by a few companies. “The idea basically is to give you the best-in-class [networking] software with the most flexible consumption model at the lowest overall total cost of ownership. So you really as an end customer have the choice to choose best-in-class solutions,” Garg told TechCrunch.
This involves building a networking operating system called ArcOS to run the networking environment. For now, that means working with manufacturers of white-box solutions and offering some combination of hardware and software, depending on what the customer requires. Garg says that players at the top of the market like Cisco, Arista and Juniper tend to keep their technical specifications to themselves, making it impossible to integrate ArcOS with those companies at this time, but he sees room for a company like Arrcus .
“Fundamentally, this is a very large marketplace that’s controlled by two or three incumbents, and when you have lack of competition you get all of the traditional bad behavior that comes along with that, including muted innovation, rigidity in terms of the solutions that are provided and these legacy procurement models, where there’s not much flexibility with artificially high pricing,” he explained.
The company hopes to fundamentally change the current system with its solutions, taking advantage of unbranded hardware that offers a similar experience but can run the Arrcus software. “Think of them as white-box manufacturers of switches and routers. Oftentimes, they come from Taiwan, where they’re unbranded, but it’s effectively the same components that are used in the same systems that are used by the [incumbents],” he said.
The approach seems to be working, as the company has grown to 50 employees since it launched in 2016. Garg says that he expects to double that number in the next six-nine months with the new funding. Currently the company has double-digit paying customers and more than 20 in various stages of proofs of concepts, he said.
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Analytics startup Heap raises $55M
Since co-founding Heap, CEO Matin Movassate has been saying that he wants to take on the analytics incumbents. Today, he’s got more money to fund that challenge, with the announcement that Heap has raised $55 million in Series C funding.
Movassate (pictured above) previously worked as a product manager at Facebook, and when I interviewed him after the startup’s Series B, he recalled the circuitous process normally required to collect and analyze user data. In contrast, Heap automatically collects data on user activity — the goal is to capture literally everything — and makes it available in a self-serve way, with no additional code required to answer new queries.
The company says it now has more than 6,000 customers, including Twilio, AppNexus, Harry’s, WeWork and Microsoft.
With this new funding, Heap has raised a total of $95.2 million. The plan is to fund international growth, as well as expand the product, engineering and go-to-market teams.
The Series C was led by NewView Capital, with participation from new DTCP, Maverick Ventures, Triangle Peak Partners, Alliance Bernstein Private Credit Investors, Sharespost and existing investors (NEA, Menlo Ventures, Initialized Capital and Pear VC). NewView founder and managing partner Ravi Viswanathan is joining the startup’s board of directors.
“Heap offers an innovative approach to automating a company’s analytics, enabling a variety of teams within an organization to obtain the data they need to make educated and, ultimately, smarter decisions,” Viswanathan said in a statement. “We are excited to team up with Heap, as they continue to develop their cutting edge software, expand their analytics automation offerings and help serve their growing numbers of customers.”
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TrustRadius, a customer-generated B2B software review platform, raises $12.5M
Customer reviews play a key role in helping people decide what to buy on consumer-focused marketplaces like Amazon or app stores, and the same tendency exists in the B2B world, where nearly half a trillion dollars is spent annually on software and IT purchases. TrustRadius, one of the startups capitalising on the latter trend, with total feedback sessions today standing at close to 190,000 reviews, has now picked up a Series C of $12.5 million led by Next Coast Ventures, with existing investors Mayfield Fund and LiveOak Ventures also participating.
The funding, which brings the total raised by TrustRadius to $25 million (modest compared to some of its competitors), will be used to build more partnerships and use cases for its reviews, as well as continue expanding that total number of users providing feedback.
In addition to its main site — which goes up against a huge number of other online software comparison services like TrustPilot, G2 Crowd, Owler and many others — TrustRadius is already working with vendors like LogMeIn, Tibco and more (including a number of huge IT companies that have asked not to be named).
TrustRadius mainly works with them on two tracks: to source a wider range of reviews from their existing customer bases to improve their profiles on the site; and then to help them use those reviews in their own marketing materials. Partnerships like these form the core of TrustRadius’s business model: people posting reviews or using the site to read them access it for free.
Vinay Bhagat, founder and CEO of TrustRadius, believes that his company’s mission — to help IT decision makers vet software by tapping into feedback from other IT buyers — has found particular relevance in the current market.
“I think that gravity is on our side,” he said in an interview. “If you think about how the tech industry is evolving and getting things done, IT decisions are getting decentralized and moving out of the CIO’s office. Millennials are ageing into positions of authority, and it means that the way people had previously bought software — by way of salespeople or on the basis of analyst reports — are changing. There is pent-up demand to hear the roar of peers and that’s where we come in.”
User-generated reviews have come under a lot of criticism in recent times. Regulators have been going after companies for not being vigilant enough about policing their platforms for “fake” reviews, either planted to big-up a product, or by rivals to knock it down, or coming from people who are being paid to put in a good word. The argument has been that the marketplaces hosting those reviews are still bringing in eyeballs and product conversions based on that feedback, so they are less concerned with the corruption even if it longer term can likely sour consumers on the trustworthiness of the whole platform.
That belief is not wholly true, of course: Amazon for one has recently been making a huge effort to improve trust, by going after dodgy reviewers and setting up systems to halt the trafficking of counterfeit goods.
And Bhagat argued to me that it doesn’t hold for TrustRadius, either. The company has a focused enough mandate — B2B software purchasing — within a crowded enough field, that losing trust by posting blindly positive reviews would get it nowhere fast.
At the same time, he noted that the company has held a firm line with its customers on making sure that the “truth” about a product is made clear even if it’s not completely rosy, in the hopes that they can use that to work on improvements, and also provide more balanced feedback at the least from existing customers in order to give a more complete picture. (It also, like other reviews sites, makes people who provide feedback do so using professional credentials like work emails and LinkedIn profiles.)
That line has so far carried it into relationships with a number of software companies, which are using reviews as a complement to their own sales teams, and the papers and analysis published by analysts like Gartner and Ovum and Forester, to reach people who are weighing up different options for their IT solutions.
“TrustRadius has become an integral part of today’s economic cycle,” said Bill Wagner, CEO of LogMeIn, in a statement. “Software buyers today need detailed reviews to make sure that the product works for a business professional like themselves. TrustRadius provides that in a transparent way, so buyers can make confident decisions, even about enterprise-grade software.”
The recent swing in the digital world toward data protection and people getting increasingly aware of how their own personal details are used in ways they never intended has presented an interesting challenge for the world of online services. Most of us don’t like getting marketing and will generally opt out of any “yes, I consent to getting updates from XYZ and its partners!” boxes — if we happen to spot them amid the dark patterning of the net.
TrustRadius and companies like it have an opportunity through that, though: by targeting IT buyers who have to make complicated purchasing decisions and most likely more than one, and in a way that ensures each purchase works with the rest of an existing tech stack, they represent one of the rare cases where a user might actually want to hear more.
Indeed, one of the company’s plans longer term is to continue developing how it can work with its users through that IT life cycle by providing suggestions of software based on previous software purchases and also what that users’ feedback has been around a past purchase.
“From day one we have been dealing with complex purchasing decisions,” Bhagat said. “Buying technology that will be used to run your business is not the same as buying an app that you use casually. It can be make or break for your company.”
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The ‘Costco of cannabis’ raises $2.8 million for a membership weed delivery service
Weed may be legal in California, but the black market is still the top spot for buyers looking for bud on a budget.
Flower Co. graduated from Y Combinator’s latest class on the promise that they could cut customers better deals by focusing on partnering with growers directly to create their own house brands while pushing users to order ahead of time. The company calls itself the “Costco of cannabis.”
The company just announced the close of a $2.8 million seed round from investors including Slome Capital, Prehype, Rob Stavis, Adam Draper, Josh Abramson and Camille Hyde.
Even in California where weed has been legalized, the black market is still king due to the high prices buoyed by high taxes. Flower Co.’s CEO Ted Lichtenberger says the regulated market is just 1/4 the size of the unregulated market. Flower Co.’s ultimate goal is less focused on getting people to ditch their existing dispensary as much as they are focused on getting black market regulars to go legit thanks to the better deals and conveniences of their platform.
Part of building allegiance to the Flower Co. brand is the company’s membership plan. Anybody can make a purchase on the site, but members save up to 40% on purchases, a number that makes a big difference when you’re buying weed by the ounce. An ounce of “Forbidden Fruit” goes for $192 without a membership and $142 with one, for example. With a membership, the company’s “House Sativa” goes for $63 an ounce.
An annual membership to Flower Co. is $119, and in addition to the discounts, users get faster delivery and beta access to the company’s “private events and concert series.” The company just recently launched a two-day delivery service for customers in Sacramento.
The company is just flexing its muscles in a few markets in California, but is hoping that by scaling slowly they can be ready to attack new opportunities as the regulatory environment shifts.
“We understand that we’re in the first inning of what’s probably a pretty long game, because this industry, as it goes federally legalized is going to have another massive transition moment just like it’s having right now as it’s getting legalized and regulated in California,” Lichtenberger says. “So if we have a great understanding of our customers and stay focused on keeping them delighted, and then be nimble in the face of that change, then we can come out as the dominant player in the delivery market.”
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