Author: Thomas Crown

Uber has acquired bike-sharing startup JUMP for an undisclosed amount of money. This comes shortly after TechCrunch reported that JUMP was in talks with Uber as well as with investors regarding a potential fundraising round involving Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz. At the time, JUMP was contemplating a sale that exceeded $100 million. We’re now hearing that the final price was closer to $200 million, according to one source close to the situation.

JUMP’s decision to sell to Uber came down to the ability to realize the bike-share company’s vision at a large scale, and quickly, JUMP CEO Ryan Rzepecki told TechCrunch over the phone. He also said Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s leadership impacted his decision.

“I had a chance to spend a couple of evenings with him, and really talk through his vision for the business and our vision, and saw a lot of alignment,” Rzepecki said.

He noted that while Uber had a rocky 2017, he’s optimistic Uber is on the right track.

“I think it’s really on the right course now and [Khosrowshahi] believes the way we approach working with cities and our vision for partnering with cities” aligns with Uber’s mission, Rzepecki said. “That was important for me and his desire to do things the right way. This is a great outcome and gives me a chance to bring my entire vision to the entire world.”

Meanwhile, becoming a top urban mobility platform is part of Uber’s ultimate vision, Khosrowshahi told TechCrunch over the phone. As more people live in cities, there will need to be a broader array of mobility options that work for both customers and cities, he said.

“We see the Uber app as moving from just being about car sharing and car hailing to really helping the consumer get from A to B int he most affordable, most dependable, most convenient way,” Khosrowshahi said. “And we think e-bikes are just a spectacularly great product.”

As part of the acquisition, JUMP employees will join Uber’s team but the bike-share company will carry on as an independent, wholly controlled subsidiary, Rzepecki said.

JUMP is best known for operating dockless, pedal-assist bikes. JUMP’s bikes can be legally locked to bike parking racks or the “furniture zone” of sidewalks, which is where you see things like light poles, benches and utility poles. The bikes also come with integrated locks to secure the bikes.

Uber’s acquisition of JUMP is not too surprising. In January, Uber partnered with JUMP to launch Uber Bike, which lets Uber riders book JUMP bikes via the Uber app. The majority of trips, however, still come through the JUMP app, Rzepecki said. For the time being, JUMP’s app will continue to exist but that may eventually change.

“It’s our hope the experience will be more deeply integrated into the Uber app moving forward and reflects what Uber has been working on in terms of being a multi-modal platform,” Rzepecki said.

Meanwhile, Uber’s international competitors have made similar moves. India-based ride-hailing startup expanded into bicycles in December. Called Ola Pedal, the service is available on a handful of university campuses in India. Then there’s Southeast Asia’s Grab and China’s Didi, which both launched their own respective bike-share services this year. Both Didi and Grab have also invested directly in bike-sharing startups Ofo and OBike, respectively.

With JUMP under the ownership of Uber, we likely won’t see JUMP partner with any of Uber’s direct competitors, but Rzepecki said other types of partnerships could be interesting.

“I think the idea of us being inside the Lyft app is not necessarily likely but there may be other partnerships that we’re able to do that are less directly competitive,” Rzepecki said.

In January, JUMP closed a $10 million Series A round led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Sinewave Ventures, Esther Dyson and others. JUMP’s January funding brought its total amount raised to $11.1 million. That same month, JUMP became the first stationless bicycle service to receive a permit to launch in San Francisco. Since then, JUMP has launched 250 dockless, pedal-assist bikes on the streets of San Francisco. Currently, people take between six to seven rides per day, with an average trip length of 2.6 miles, Rzepecki said.

“We really know we are serving a commute,” Rzepecki said. “We’re serving the morning and evening commute. I think 22 percent of trips are in the morning and 20 percent in the evening commute. We’ve really been a commuting solution.”

In October, the SFMTA will determine if JUMP can deploy an additional 250 bikes. The SFMTA will make its decision based on an evaluation of the program’s first nine months. That evaluation, the SFMTA told TechCrunch in January, will entail determining where the city should promote stationless bike-share, the impact stationless bike-share has on the public right-of-way, “including maintaining accessible pedestrian paths of travel, as well as the enforcement/maintenance burden on city staff.”

JUMP also operates its e-bike network in Washington D.C., and plans to launch in Sacramento and Providence, Rhode Island later this year. Through its software and hardware offerings, it operates via third-parties, like cities, campuses and corporations, in 40 markets including Portland, New Orleans and Atlanta. JUMP is also interested in deploying its bikes in Europe, where it hopes to be by spring of 2019. JUMP has also applied for a permit to operate in New York, which recently legalized electric, pedal-assist bikes.

E-bikes, of course, are not the only way to get around town these days. This year, we’ve seen a number of startups launch electric scooters. While San Francisco is trying to figure out how to regulate them, people are watching closely to see what comes next.

Khosrowshahi is one of those people. He told me he’s been “staring at some of them quizzically on the streets.”

Scooters are in an “odd spot” due to the lack of regulation, Khosrowshahi said, but Uber will “look at any and all options” that “move in a direction that is city friendly.”

from TechCrunch

City Pantry, the office catering marketplace to make it easy to order in food for staff, company events and meetings, has restocked its funding.

The London-based startup has raised a new £4 million round led by Octopus Investments with participation from existing investors and Newable Private Investing — capital it plans to use to expand into more cities across the U.K. over the next 18 months.

Founded by Stuart Sunderland in 2013, City Pantry set out to improve the catering options open to companies in London. Its marketplace connects local caterers to businesses who need quality food delivered to their offices or to cover events, meeting and regular team meals.

When the startup first launched, Sunderland viewed its main competitors as traditional corporate caterers, sandwich retailers, pizza delivery places, and to a lesser extent, the newer breed of restaurant delivery companies such as Deliveroo and Uber’s UberEATs.

“While we’ve all seen the phenomenal growth of online food delivery in B2C over the past few years, food to businesses lags significantly behind,” he says, noting that legacy relationships with caterers and “the unique pressures of ordering for larger groups make innovation and progress slower”.

City Pantry claims to now serve over 20,000 meals per week to the employees of more than 500 companies, including Google, Amazon, PayPal, Slack, Spotify and Unilever. The marketplace has on-boarded 300 popular London restaurants and caterers.

This, says Sunderland, is evidence that City Pantry is successfully bridging the gap between the type of food options consumers have become accustomed to and what is traditionally available in the world of corporate catering.

More broadly, he says the company is tapping into a growing demand from employees for “greater workplace wellbeing”. This in turn is seeing employers wanting to offer more than just a good salary.

Grant Paul-Florence, Head of Intermediate Capital at Octopus Investments, echoes this sentiment, arguing that City Pantry is “uniquely placed to satisfy the growing appetite for high quality, hassle-free workplace meals, which organisations are increasingly demanding as they work to build an attractive company
culture”.

Meanwhile, I’m told the startup has made a couple of significant hires in the last 12 months: Kate Miller (previously McKinsey, Google, and HelloFresh) has joined as CCO, and Sharon Lee (previously DHL, Elster Group, SushiDaily) has joined as COO.

from TechCrunch

Bitmovin, the online video software and infrastructure company founded by two of the creators of the MPEG-DASH video streaming standard, has raised $30 million in Series B funding. The round is led by Highland Europe, with participation from existing investors Atomico, Constantia New Business, Dawn Capital, and Y Combinator.

The company says the new round of funding will be used to scale its product R&D, field engineering and sales teams worldwide — with the aim being to expand its global customer base of TV streaming providers, internet companies and social media companies. The Series B brings total funding for the 2013-founded company and Y Combinator alumnus to $43 million.

“Bitmovin came about as a spin-off from research we did together at the the University of Klagenfurt, in Austria. During our PhDs we co-created the MPEG-DASH video streaming standard, which is used by YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, etc. amongst many others today, and which is used in total for more than 50% of the peak internet traffic,” says Bitmovin CEO Stefan Lederer, who founded the company with CTO Christopher Müller. “The research evolved into the company, with the help of angel investors including senior people at Cisco, Netflix, Accenture, Drupal and DropBox”.

Two years after Bitmovin turned from academic research into a commercial entity, the startup went through Y Combinator as a member of the summer 2015 cohort, which Lederer says was perfect timing. “We also won our first U.S. customers at the same time, which then made the move to California a much easier transition to make. Y Combinator really helped us as founders that started from a technical background. They helped us refine our go-to-market strategy and make products out of the technology that we had created”.

Today the company has offices in Austria, London, New York, San Francisco, and Hong Kong. The Bitmovin CEO says there is more to come following this round as the explosion of high quality online video content shows no signs of slowing.

The Bitmovin platform — broadly consisting of video compression, playback and analytics APIs — feeds into a growing trend that is seeing consumers expect online video to match the quality and user experience of Netflix and Amazon’s video streaming services. In turn, companies are finding that building an in-house solution can be prohibitively expensive and is prone to becoming obsolete as new codecs come onboard and older video infrastructure technology becomes obsolete.

“Our technology makes it possible to get high quality video to audiences wherever they are and whatever device they may be using – levelling the playing field with traditional media owners and broadcasters,” he explains. “The focus is really on efficiency and performance, making video load faster, stop buffering, increase quality, and reduce the amount of bandwidth one needs to see high quality video.

“We are different from the existing vendors as we are deeply developer and API focussed, with a passion for innovation and disruptive technologies. That’s our background, we are engineers, and we like to build the best products. Thus we’ve been the first ones in many new technologies on the market, setting the bar on performance and efficiency of video streaming”.

On the technology side, recent Bitmovin announcements include the ability to use AI to encode videos more effectively (learning, scene-by-scene how each video is treated so the next one is handled more quickly) and a new video player that can reduce the load time on a typical HTML page by a second.

“We’re also proud to support a new royalty-free codec called AV1, which came out last week (backed by Apple, Bitmovin, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Samsung, amongst others). It shifts the tectonic plates in video because it’s the first time that online video innovation will be possible without making payments to a pool of incumbent, traditional media and consumer electronics companies. It helps opens the playing field to internet companies to, potentially, take more of the lead in video entertainment. It also means more predictability as companies will not be affected by changes in patent pools,” says Lederer.

To that end, the Bitmovin founder says customers include Sling, Periscope, The New York Times, ProSiebenSat.1, Red Bull Media House, FuboTV, RTL and iflix. “We are getting a lot of interest in the market, with a lot of new customers. Just last year we had a revenue growth of 3.5x, and we expect similar growth this year, which is great, but at the same time we want to make sure we continue to provide the best service and products to our customers. So we invest heavily in our engineering, solution and support teams, to maintain our DNA as an engineering and developer-first company,” he adds.

from TechCrunch

The future of artificial intelligence (AI), the technology that is seen as potentially impacting almost every industry on the planet, is widely acknowledged to be a war between tech firms in America and China.

In a notable side-note to that battle, China now has the world’s highest-valued AI startup after SenseTime, a company founded in 2014, announced a $600 million Series C investment round. A source with knowledge of discussions told TechCrunch that the round values the company at over $4.5 billion, while it is also raising an extension to this round. That marks a hefty increase on the company’s most recent $1.5 billion valuation when it raised a $410 million Series B last year.

SenseTime CEO Li Xu said the company plans to use the capital to expand its presence overseas and “widen the scope for more industrial application of AI.”

Beyond the high figures involved — the round is a record fundraising for an AI company worldwide — SenseTime’s investment efforts are notable because of the names that have backed it.

Principally that’s Alibaba, the $429 billion e-commerce giant, which led this Series C round and is reportedly now SenseTime’s largest single investor, according to Bloomberg.

Beyond that, U.S. chipmaker giant Qualcomm signed up last year — seemingly as an early participant in this round — while Singapore’s sovereign fund Temasek and China’s largest electronics retailer Suning, which has taken investment from Alibaba, entered the round as new backers. Indeed, Suning’s push to for its store of the future, which was started by that Alibaba investment, uses SenseTime to power its facial recognition payment at staff-less checkouts and also for customer analysis using big data systems.

“SenseTime is doing pioneering work in artificial intelligence. We are especially impressed by their R&D capabilities in deep learning and visual computing. Our business at Alibaba is already seeing tangible benefits from our investments in AI and we are committed to further investment,” said Joe Tsai, Alibaba’s executive vice chairman.

SenseTime said it has more than 400 customers across a range of verticals including fintech, automotive, fintech, smartphones, smart city development and more that include Honda, Nvidia, China’s UnionPay, Weibo, China Merchants Bank, Huawei, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi.

Perhaps its most visible partner is the Chinese government, which uses its systems for its national surveillance system. SenseTime process data captured by China’s 170 million CCTV cameras and newer systems which include smart glasses worn by police offers on the street.

China has placed vast emphasis on tech development, with AI one of its key flagposts.

A government program aims to make the country the world leader in AI technology by 2030, the New York Times reported, by which time it is estimated that the industry could be worth some $150 billion per year. SenseTime’s continued development fees directly into that ambition.

“AI is really changing every profession and every industry. There’s almost nothing that won’t be touched by AI,” investor Kai-Fu Lee, formerly the head of Google in China, said at a TechCrunch event back in 2016.

Even two years ago, the potential was evident, with Lee explaining that teaching, medicine and healthcare were obvious areas for disruption.

Perhaps the main difference between the state of AI development in the U.S. and China is that, in America, much of the technology is being developed in big tech firms like Amazon and Google. In China, however, companies like SenseTime and its rival Megvii (which develops the Face++ platform) are independent entities that operate with the financial backing of giants like Alibaba.

from TechCrunch

Lego Mindstorms have paved the way for many programmable toys. And Austrian startup Robo Wunderkind is building a new kind of Lego-like programmable kit. The startup first launched on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage and just raised $1.2 million (€1 million) from SOSV, Austrian Federal Promotional Bank and multiple business angels.

Compared to many programmable toys out there, Robo Wunderkind is still a Lego-like building kit. This is key as too many toys forget that it’s fun to build something with a few bricks.

Robo Wunderkind also has special blocks to turn your dumb robot into a connected one. In addition to the usual sensors, such as proximity sensors, motion detectors and light sensors, the company also has some more sophisticated ones. You can put a tiny camera in your construction, use an IR blaster and receiver and program a tiny LED screen.

But the best part is that Robo Wunderkind also sells Lego adapters so that you can put together a sophisticated robot that uses both Lego bricks and Robo Wunderkind modules.

The company has two different apps in the store. The first one called Robo Live lets you control your robot in real time. The other one Robo Code has a brand new user interface and now detects the blocks you’re currently using.

Robo Code is where Robo Wunderkind shines because you can put together simple algorithms by arranging virtual blocks in the iPad app. It’s a good way to introduce a kid to conditional statements and loops.

You won’t build a robot as sophisticated as a robot built using Lego Mindstorms. But Robo Wunderkind seems more accessible and good way to try robotics before switching to Arduino and Raspberry Pi when your kid grows up.

The company successfully raised a little less than $250,000 on Kickstarter back in 2015. You can now buy a starter kit for $250. Advanced and professional kits will also be available soon.

from TechCrunch