Month: December 2022

Firefox developer Mozilla is making a rare foray into the world of mergers and acquisitions, with news that it has snapped up recently-shuttered California-based productivity startup Pulse.

Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but the deal is tantamount to an “acqui-hire,” with Mozilla looking to deploy the Pulse team across an array of machine learning (ML) projects.

“We’re acquiring Pulse for the incredible team they have built,” Mozilla chief product officer Steve Teixeira told TechCrunch. “As we look to continue to improve user experiences across all of our products, ML will be a core part of that.”

Feel the pulse

Founded out of Menlo Park in 2019, Pulse in its initial guise was a “virtual office” platform called Loop Team, but after honing the idea for a couple of years it pivoted and rebranded last November. Pulse, essentially, was an automated status-updating tool that used signals based on pre-configured integrations and preferences set by the user.

For example, users could synchronize Pulse with their calendar and Slack, setting rules to stipulate what their status and corresponding emoji should be based on keywords in their calendar event title. If their schedule for a particular time says “hair appointment” from 12-1pm, then the person’s Slack status update might display a scissors emoji alongside the word “haircut.” Or, it might say “birthday” alongside a cake emoji if that’s what is in their calendar.

But Pulse sported myriad integrations with business tools that brought similar functionality. For example, users could link Pulse with Zoom, so that whenever they start a video meeting, a telephone emoji automatically displays in their Slack status to tell people they are unavailable.

Shutting shop

Pulse had flown largely under the radar since it started rolling out to a small group of users last December, but the company had apparently garnered some fairly big-name customers, including Netflix and 1Password, with monthly premium plans starting at around $3 per user.

The company was among TechCrunch’s Battlefield 200 startups at TC Disrupt in October, and TechCrunch interviewed Pulse cofounder and CEO Raj Singh at the event for a potential future startup profile piece. Singh said at the time that it was planning to raise a seed round of funding early in the new year, something that obviously won’t be happening now. When quizzed on whether Pulse was more like a feature that the big tech platforms could just build themselves, rather than a sustainable business in its own right, Singh was adamant that Pulse could thrive as a standalone product. While he acknowledged that companies such as Microsoft or Google might well want to develop a similar automated status update tool for their own products, they were less incentivised to make it work well as an integrated feature that plays ball with various third-party tools.

Pulse was all about communicating things to colleagues around the world passively, regardless of what tools they were using or what timezone they’re in. This is particularly important with remote work becoming the norm, and Pulse was looking to find its niche at a time when workplace culture is rapidly changing.

“A lot of people actually want to update their status, but it’s tedious,” Singh told TechCrunch in October. “But there’s hundreds of signals, and the thing we realised was status is not just ‘availability’, it’s actually a way to communicate empathy.”

While Pulse did have plans to expand beyond Slack into other workplace communication tools including Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace, the company abruptly announced in late October that it was shutting down. In an email distributed to customers at the time, the company attributed this to “market conditions,” noting that it was finding it difficult to raise fresh capital — but it did confirm that it had found a buyer, the identity of which was unknown until today. Singh also said in the email that there was a chance that the buyer could resurrect Pulse in some form, but there is little indication that Mozilla has such a plan on its radar.

What’s next

To the casual observer, Slack was probably the obvious contender to acquire Pulse. For starters, there is the fact that Pulse had been focused exclusively on Slack status updates. But on top of that, Singh had previously founded a smart calendar app called Tempo AI which he sold to Salesforce for an undisclosed sum in 2015.

Singh then joined Salesforce to help with the initial transition of Tempo AI’s technology into Salesforce’s Inbox app. And as we now know, Salesforce went on to acquire Slack in 2020, so with Singh’s connections to Salesforce and his product’s close alignment with Slack, there seemed like only one possible suitor here.

Alas, Slack hasn’t acquired Pulse — the Mozilla Corporation has. It is something of a surprise, if for no other reason than Mozilla isn’t renowned for its M&A endeavors, though it is starting to ramp up its investment efforts after launching its first venture capital fund last month. But its only known acquisition to date was back in 2017, when it snapped up Pocket, a popular read-it-later web-clipping service that Mozilla had already integrated into its Firefox browser two years previous.

As a side point, Pulse itself had been on something of an acquisition spree this year, buying rival status updating service Holopod back in January, followed by audio-based communications platform Commons in March. Then in May, news emerged that Pulse had acquired team communication startup Lounge.

“Our strategy [with M&A] is pretty straightforward — we look for opportunities to bring on talent and technology that helps us improve experiences for our customers,” Teixeira said. “With Pulse, this is about supplementing the skillsets we have here already as a way to speed up our development efforts. We have a high bar for any acquisition, but if we find teams and technologies with incredible talent that share our mission and vision for the future of the internet, we are absolutely open to pursuing a transaction.”

As it happens, Pocket may be an early beneficiary of the Pulse acquisition. While Mozilla ultimately plans to deploy the Pulse team across various projects, Teixeira says that an early focus will be on using ML to improve personalization in Pocket, which presumably means in the form of content recommendations.

It’s worth noting that Mozilla has dabbled with ML a fair bit in the past, including experimental projects inside Firefox that recommend content to users, as well as tracking prices across myriad online stores. The company is also leveraging ML across various voice and speech projects.

“We see opportunity to use ML in virtually all of our products, including Firefox, as a foundation for improving the experience for all of our customers,” Teixeira said.

Mozilla hasn’t revealed how much it’s doling out for the startup, but Pulse had only raised around $4.7 million in pre-seed funding according to Crunchbase data, and given its difficulties in raising fresh capital, it’s safe to assume that Mozilla hasn’t broken the bank here.

What Mozilla is getting for its money is six people, including Pulse’s three founders Raj Singh, Jag Srawan, and Rolf Rando, each bringing significant engineering, ML, and product execution experience to Mozilla’s ML efforts. Singh actually created his previous startup Tempo AI as a project inside SRI International, the Stanford research institute responsible for Siri. He rejoined SRI as executive in residence (EIR) after leaving Salesforce, remaining there until founding Pulse (then Loop Team) nearly four years ago.

“In building Pulse, we enabled a variety of machine learning experiences to make distributed teams feel more connected,” Singh noted. “Finding ways to use AI and machine learning to simplify tasks for users is our passion.”

Mozilla acquires the team behind Pulse, an automated status updater for Slack by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

The team at the newly popular Twitter alternative Hive is in over their head. The company has now taken the fairly radical step of fully shutting down its servers for a couple of days in response to concerns raised by security researchers who discovered a number of critical vulnerabilities on Hive, several of which they say remain unfixed. The issues they found would allow attackers access to all data, including private posts and messages, shared media and even deleted direct messages, as well as the ability to edit other people’s Hive posts.

The researchers, a part of a German collective called Zerforschung, claimed they confidentially reported the security vulnerabilities to Hive’s team, noting it was initially difficult to reach a point of contact at the company. Several days later, Hive replied, claiming the issues to be fixed, a Zerforschung blog post explains. However, the researchers found this was not the case so they took their concerns to the public, warning people against using Hive’s app.

Shortly after, Hive announced it was temporarily shutting down its servers to address these problems. It also claimed, across several tweets, that they never told the researchers the issues were “fixed” but that they were “fixing” them, eventually deciding to go offline until problems were addressed.

It’s an unusual way to patch bugs, to say the least, and one that raises questions about the development workflow at the company. Is there not a dev environment where code is fixed, then staged for a release? How bad was the code that it requires a full stop of company operations to rework it?

These aren’t the first concerns that have been raised about Hive in the weeks following its rapid growth, which has been fueled by Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Today, a number of Twitter users are unhappy with the direction Musk is taking the social network and have been seeking out alternatives. This has led to sizable boosts to the user bases of other social apps, including Mastodon, CoHost, Tumblr, CounterSocial, Post News, Koo, and Hive, among others.

But it’s also led to increased scrutiny for Hive, a smaller app that until recently was a two-person team. The company has not always been fully transparent about its inner workings, corporate structure, moderation capabilities, or sources of funding. This tends to leave Hive users looking for information on their own, then raising questions about what they dig up.

For example, one of the issues that popped up in the past couple of weeks involved the resurfacing of an older, problematic tweet posted by a former employee, Gil Malfabon, who created Hive’s design system. Hive publicly confirmed Malfabon was no longer with the company, and he privately confirmed the same to TechCrunch. While the designer currently appears listed on tax filings (PDF) as an officer, he says next year’s filing should be accurate.

Hive also recently told TechCrunch it now has two other employees in addition to the 24-year-old founder and self-taught coder Kassandra Pop (who goes by other online usernames like Raluca and Salem.). But Pop wouldn’t disclose the full names of her team members when asked, referring to them only as Joshua and Pablo. She said they didn’t want the attention. The company has also grown to some 2 million users, according to aBusiness Insider report published on Nov. 22, but hasn’t explained how it’s being funded. (Recent tweets hint that funding conversations are in the works, however.)

In terms of the product, Hive has also faced several issues. When the company’s server reached capacity under the influx of new users in late November, Hive allowed duplicate usernames to be created. It said that there could be other duplicate usernames from when Hive first launched, as well. The company claims the issue is now fixed, but it’s an obvious security concern as duplicates could allow for impersonation. In addition Hive frequently replies to Twitter users’ requests for usernames to “free up” their preferred handles for them, as it did recently for YouTuber iJustine — a sort of ad hoc system to address its lack of verification procedures.

Worse, the company has grown a network to millions of users without moderators, security teams, or staff focused on GDPR or other regulatory compliance. This could be chalked up to naivete, perhaps, about what it means to run a social network in 2022, but it’s also reckless and negligent. But Hive may get away with it, if the funding arrives.

Pop told Insider she planned to use future funds to hire moderators to filter out gore, violence and child exploitation content, to give you an idea of the urgency. Hive has been asked for comment but did not immediately reply.

Twitter alternative Hive shuts down its app to fix critical security issues by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Today’s Google Doodle lets you make, play and share your own mini arcade game to honor the memory of videogame pioneer Jerry Lawson. Lawson led the team that developed the first home video gaming system with interchangeable game cartridges. Today would have been his 82nd birthday.

The interactive Doodle starts off by taking you through a short experience that introduces you to Lawson and his legacy. The first part of the experience is a tutorial that teaches you about the basic controls and editing features. From there, you can navigate to five ready-to-play games. You can play the games as they are, or you can click on the pencil icon to edit them.

If you want to create your own game, you can navigate to the home screen and click on the empty cartridge icon with a plus sign on it. Once you’re done with your creation, you can use the share button to send it to your friends.

The five ready-to-play games were designed by three American artists and game designers: Davionne Gooden, Lauren Brown and Momo Pixel.

Lawson was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1940 and had tinkered with electronics from an early age. He started his career in Palo Alto, California and joined Fairchild Semiconductor as an engineering consultant. He led the development of the Fairchild Channel F system (the F stands for fun), which was the first home video game system console that featured interchangeable game cartridges, an eight-way digital joystick and a pause menu. The system paved the way for future gaming systems like the Atari, SNES, Dreamcast and more.

In 1980, Lawson left Fairchild to start his own company, VideoSoft, which was one of the earliest Black-owned video game development companies. VideoSoft created software for the Atari 2600, which popularized the cartridge Lawson and his team developed.

Google’s latest Doodle lets you create your own mini arcade game by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

In what can only be characterized as a stunning turn of events, Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor announced his resignation yesterday, claiming he wanted to return to his entrepreneurial roots. Whatever his reasons, it was a shock to all who cover this company, and it’s safe to say that few if any saw this coming — even his mentor, Salesforce co-founder and co-CEO Marc Benioff.

Taylor is a Silicon Valley mover and a shaker. He’s worked at big companies like Google and Facebook. Until recently, he was board chair at Twitter, helping lead the social media giant through this turbulent year of Musk-induced madness until its new owner dissolved its board last month.

He also has small-company experience as former CEO at FriendFeed, an early social networking outfit, and Quip, which Salesforce bought in 2016 for a hefty $750 million.

Taylor and Benioff seemed to hit it off immediately after Quip joined Salesforce, and the relationship was (and apparently remains) deep and heartfelt. As a result, Taylor raced through the ranks at the CRM giant to co-chairman and co-CEO in just four years.

When Jeff Bezos stepped back as CEO at Amazon last year after leading the company since its founding in 1994, we speculated that Benioff could be the next executive to take that step. The logical choice, the heir apparent, appeared to be Taylor, who was poised to take over whenever Benioff decided to spend more time in Hawaii.

Instead, we have Taylor walking away and Benioff in charge for the foreseeable future.

No one seemed to see Bret Taylor stepping away from Salesforce (even Marc Benioff) by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

One of the top problems facing device manufacturers today is overheating hardware. The chips inside PCs generate heat, which — when allowed to build up — majorly hurts performance. Cooling is less of a challenge when space isn’t at a premium. But as the marketplace pushes for ever-thinner notebooks and so-called ultraportables, manufacturers are being faced with a choice: compromise on design or on raw processing power.

Seshu Madhavapeddy and Surya Ganti hope to present a third option with hardware they’ve developed at their four-year-old startup, Frore Systems. Called AirJet and weighing in at just 11 grams on the low end, the microelectromechanical chip can supposedly deliver improved thermal performance by actively removing heat from processors.

“Until now, manufacturers have used antiquated thermal solutions like mechanical fans in notebooks, tablets and other consumer devices to remove heat. These inadequate thermal solutions are causing the devices to overheat,” Madhavapeddy told TechCrunch in an email interview. “To combat this, manufacturers have designed fail-safe functionality that prevents overheating by slowing down the processor after only a few seconds of operation. This means consumers never really get the full processor performance they pay for. Frore Systems’ AirJet chips unleash full processor performance by revolutionizing active heat removal.”

Madhavapeddy and Ganti share a long history in the mobile device and semiconductor industry. Madhavapeddy was the general manager of Texas Instruments’ smartphones business line for five years, after which he led the product and technology division at Samsung Mobile, Samsung’s mobile device subsidiary. Ganti was a research scientist at General Electric for seven years, where he developed “nanotextured” surfaces and algorithms for predicting the reliability of electromechanical systems.

Madhavapeddy and Ganti met at Qualcomm while working together on the company’s ultrasonic fingerprint sensor business. Madhavapeddy says they were both inspired by what they saw as “significant” limitations that processor heat generation was creating for device performance and decided to put their heads together to solve the challenge.

In high-level language, Madhavapeddy describes AirJet — under development for the past four years — as a “solid-state” chip that uses “pulsating” air flow to cool computer parts. Several patents filed by the company peel back the curtains a bit. AirJet, which sits above the hardware it’s meant to cool, is 2.8 mm thick and built on flexible, bendable polymer materials. It contains piezoelectric layers and electrodes stacked on top of each other and oriented around a central opening. (Piezoelectric materials produce electricity when they’re compressed or placed under mechanical stress.) A diaphragm coupled to the piezoelectric layers covers the central opening, vibrating and blowing air across the hardware to be cooled when a voltage is applied to the electrodes.

Pulsating heat pipes aren’t a completely new idea. Conceived as far back as 1990, they’ve been tested in various data center server designs over the past 20 years and proposed in academic papers for use cases like phone heat sinks.

But Madhavapeddy makes the case that, as opposed to many of the designs that’ve been floated to date, Frore’s technology is market-ready. He pitches AirJet as a solution for phones, PCs and tablets otherwise too thin to fit traditional active cooling systems, like fans.

“AirJet chips are scalable, meaning multiple chips can be easily integrated into devices to cool processors silently, resulting in major performance gains,” Madhavapeddy said. “AirJet chips can also be used as the thermal solution in dust proof-devices as, unlike fans, they are powerful enough to draw air through the IP68 air filter used to make devices dust-proof.”

While Frore claims to be working with “five of the world’s top ten device manufacturers” and expects its first AirJet chips to ship in Q1 2023, it’s still too early to tell whether the startup’s tech will live up to its promises. Madhavapeddy says that AirJet can deliver a roughly “2x” boost in processor performance compared to fan-based cooling, but the vague metric doesn’t account for the wide variation in fan size, setups and housing. That aside, it’s unclear whether Frore can produce AirJet units at the scale necessary for the consumer market, and whether the company can convince manufacturers that’ve invested in alternative cooling systems, like water cooling and vapor chambers, to pivot to a completely different approach.

Frore does, however, have votes of confidence from titans in the chip industry, including Qualcomm’s venture arm, Qualcomm Ventures, which led a $100 million investment in the startup alongside Mayfield, Addition and Clear Ventures. Intel is a customer; the company plans to collaborate with Frore to build AirJet into future laptops in its Evo hardware reference platform.

“Intel’s mission with Intel Evo is to unite the open PC ecosystem to deliver the best possible laptop experiences that people want. Engineering thin, light, stylish laptop designs that offer great performance while remaining cool and quiet are foundational to that mission,” Intel VP and GM of mobile platforms Josh Newman said in a press release. “Frore Systems’ Airjet technology offers a new and novel approach to help achieve these design goals in new ways.”

But what of the slowing PC market and demand for PC parts? (According to Gartner, worldwide PC shipments declined nearly 20% in Q3 2022 compared to a year ago.) While Madhavapeddy acknowledged that it could have an impact on Frore’s business, he seemed confident that AirJet’s expanding partnerships will compensate for shipment volume shortfalls in any single segment.

“The pandemic has increased the value proposition for AirJet. The world has become increasingly mobile and reliant on devices to stay connected in both the workplace and at home… We do not anticipate the broader slowdown in tech will adversely impact Frore,” Madhavapeddy continued. “Even if demand for consumer devices slows, in a market where manufacturers are fiercely competing for the consumer spending and market share, the ability to differentiate their devices by offering superior processor performance will ensure demand for the AirJet product. This is being reflected in customer interest in and demand for AirJet.”

Headquartered in San Jose, Frore has a 75-person workforce and has raised $116 million to date. Madhavapeddy says a portion of the capital is already going toward new generations of AirJet, which will deliver further performance gains (or so he claims).

Frore secures $100M, collabs with Intel to create a new way to cool processors by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

LinkedIn, the social platform for the working world for networking and recruitment, hasn’t been the biggest name in headlines when it comes to how social media is leveraged for spam, scams and fake news, but they’re all significant problems on the platform that will only get bigger as traffic grows (as it’s doing currently, at a rate of 34%/year), and as/if businesses and people fly from other social networks and look to the likes of LinkedIn, which now has some 875 million members, for more targeted business interactions.

Today the company made a couple of announcements related to its direct messaging service — your private inbox that sits alongside your public feed — that speak to this theme: LinkedIn is rolling out a “focused” option for incoming messages with others relegated to an “other” box; and it’s turning on new automatic spam and harassment detection and a new feature to report unwanted messaging.

The new features are critical for the health of LinkedIn and its wider business.

The company says that there are some 21 inMails — direct messages — sent every second with job opportunities at the moment. (For those of you who feel like you get a lot of unwanted solicitations… that’s a global figure, not just for you!) Having an experience full of spam and other junk will turn off people from using the service, which will make it less effective for outreach for recruiters, and thus less likely they pay send those messages on LinkedIn.

But the kernel within that business logic is the other reason: it’s important for everyday users’ experience. LinkedIn’s transparency report from earlier in the year found that LinkedIn proactively removed 70.8 million spam and scam messages on its platform, and that users reported a further (mere) 179,000. I’m guessing that this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what people could report were it easier to do so.

Looking at the company’s itemization of unwanted content over the last couple of years, it’s notable how it’s grown overall (misinformation wasn’t even category until the latter half of 2020. Does that mean that LinkedIn didn’t care if it existed? Or that it didn’t exist? Or that it was too small to cover? Regardless, it’s there now and it’s growing.)

There is an underlying question a lot of you might be asking about all of this, which is: isn’t LinkedIn just one big platform for spam, in the form of unsolicited efforts from people getting in touch to try to get something out of you or fishing for something? In which case, it’s a challenge to think of how LinkedIn will use its AI algorithms, formidable as they are, to separate what you really want to see out of all of that, spam or just otherwise unwanted contact.

That’s a bigger problem for the company, but actually one for a lot of other social media too — although the businesslike/business-lite nature of LinkedIn definitely seems to carry a more serious undercurrent to it all — one reason why the FBI came out saying investment fraud on LinkedIn in particular was a “significant threat” to the platform and its users.

Focused messagesinclude “the most relevant new opportunities and outreach,” the company says. Other will have everything else. LinkedIn says that the system works using AI algorithms, meaning there is a degree to which it’s also learning from what you open and engage with to know what to send where in future.

The spam reporting, meanwhile, will come in the form of a new action that is offered to you when you read or triage you mail, “report an inappropriate message.” The automated tools, quietly already being rolled out, “warn you when harassment is detected within private messaging,” LinkedIn says. It either gets sent directly to spam or if it’s questionable, it stays in your inbox with a label you see before reading. You can take action on these as with regular messages to report spam or abuse.

Alongside these, LinkedIn says that it’s adding live captioning on the video messaging feature it provides to improve accessibility — part of a bigger raft of features it’s been putting into messaging after rebuilding the platform to include not just video messaging, but editing abilities and other features to better handle inboxes to turn them into a destination part of the site.

The bigger messaging makeover has been especially notable given how little evolution Twitter has brought to its direct messaging experience over the years, and how Facebook’s similarly gone slower in Messenger after the bot-flurry, with more interesting feature updates coming instead to Instagram and WhatsApp.

The new features were being tried out in smaller groups before now — I am on its premium tier, and I seem to have had the “other” and “focused” feature in my inbox for a while now — but now they are going global, the company tells me.

LinkedIn rolls out focused inbox and messaging safety tools as it gets to grip with spam and scams by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Two months ago, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it had fined 16 Wall Street firms more than $1.1 billion for “widespread recordkeeping failures” regarding maintaining electronic communications, contravening federal securities laws. In addition, the SEC is now probing private equity firms on their employees’ use of messaging apps for work purposes, including WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram, as many of these apps have functions that support messages that disappear automatically, representing potential violations of SEC rules.

To compound matters, many companies have now adopted remote or hybrid work models, enabling employees to mix working from the office and home, making it more difficult for financial institutions to track employees’ communications.

And it’s against that backdrop that Tel Aviv– and New York–based communication compliance platform Shield wants to address the issues that most banks and investment firms face, including record management, electronic discovery, supervision and surveillance.

Keeping up

Regulators continuously change or add new compliance standards faster than companies can adapt, which can lead to big fines and reputational damage for banks worldwide, Shield CEO and co-founder Shiran Weitzman explained to TechCrunch. Another challenge, according to Weitzman, is the difficulty in capturing data transmitted through apps such as WhatsApp. The complexity of communication channels, and the usage of both voice and text, make it more difficult for organizations to follow the “paper” trail.

To meet this rising demand for “more advanced” cross-channel surveillance, Shield announced Thursday it has raised $20 million in a Series B round of funding. Its previous backer Macquarie Capital led the round alongside UBS Next, a venture fund from Swiss bank UBS, and existing investors such as Mindset Venture and OurCrowd.

The four-year-old startup said that it plans to use the proceeds to grow its global presence and ramp up development of its communications compliance platform.

“There is an immediate market need for more advanced surveillance solutions to allow financial institutions to meet new regulations and fight financial crime,” Weitzman said. “Understanding that regulators will continue in this strict enforcement period, and that banks will not be halting usage of communication channels as work from home is now permanent.”

When asked how the company handles the users’ data, Weitzman said it operates under the same strict regulations as its customers. “Shield does not store users’ data and does not have access to customers’ data. We take proactive measures to protect data by masking personally identifiable identification (PII) within communications.”

Shield leans on AI techniques to help companies counter market abuse, bad internal actors and regulatory risk. The startup, which isn’t the only company using AI, would compete with AI-powered communication surveillance platforms like Behavox and Relativity in the industry. Shield recently introduced new eDiscovery capabilities allowing users to respond quickly to regulatory inquiries. The company partnered with London-based speech and NLP technology company Intelligent Voice to bolster its voice surveillance capabilities, Weitzman noted.

The company’s latest cash injection comes less than a year after Shield raised a $15 million Series A, and the company said that it has grown its sales by 280% year-on-year. The company said that it has also increased its customer base by 250% since its previous funding round back in January. In addition, Shield opened an R&D facility in Lisbon this year, Weitzman said, adding that the company chose Portugal because it is becoming a major European tech hub.

Shield, a communication compliance platform for financial institutions, raises $20M by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch

Car rental delivery startup Kyte said it’s on a mission to disrupt the auto industry by making people think twice about buying a car. Starting Wednesday, Kyte will now offer a car subscription service, following what the startup says was a successful subscription pilot with Teslas. The three-, six- and 12-month subscription plans will be available to all 14 markets in which Kyte operates, such as San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Boston and, most recently, Fort Lauderdale, the company said.

A range of SUVs, sedans and economy cars, in addition to Teslas, will now be available for longer-term subscriptions. Kyte named a few makes and models it would add to its subscription fleet, including the Kia Forte, Toyota Camry and Jeep Compass. Subscriptions include registration, maintenance, roadside assistance and door-to-door delivery and pickup.

The move into the subscription business comes as the average price paid for a new vehicle in the United States continues to remain around the $48,000 mark, according to September data from Kelley Blue Book. With interest rates and average monthly payments up, many Americans are rethinking the purchase of a new vehicle. But does that mean they’re going to be okay with spending a minimum of $519 per month for a subscription service?

According to a recent Nationwide survey, consumers are shifting spending habits in preparation of an upcoming recession. Around a third have adjusted their budgets and reduced the amount that they drive, the latter of which is likely also attributable to the price of gas at the moment. Yet Erik Zahnlecker, Kyte’s director of new products, thinks there’s still a need for subscription car services today.

“Coming out of the pandemic, the way we live, work, play and travel has significantly changed. More than ever, ‘digital nomads’ are emerging, and Americans are looking for flexible options that match their new lifestyles,” Zahnlecker told TechCrunch via email. “Car leasing or ownership comes with hassles and commitments (like depreciation, lock-in, maintenance and more) that may not suit a consumer’s desired next move. At Kyte, we’re committed to creating options for anyone looking for a ride longer than a ride-share. This whitespace is highly desired, and we saw great success with our initial Tesla subscription rollout – so we wanted to make this offering more accessible.”

Kyte began offering Tesla Model 3s for $995 per month earlier this year; the company’s Tesla’s are only available for subscription, whereas the rest of the fleet will go between subscriptions and short-term rentals, according to Zahnlecker. Kyte wouldn’t share specifics on how many users signed up for a Tesla, but Zahnlecker said there has been zero downtime between subscribers due to demand.

“The majority of our subscription customers (>50%) choose to subscribe for 12 months, showing that subscriptions is not just for people ‘in between things,’ but is also a valid alternative to leasing or ownership,” said Zahnlecker.

It’s also possible that the Tesla subscription service worked so well because, well, Teslas are really popular vehicles. They’re a luxury status symbol, and renting one not only gets drivers out of paying $47,000 for what at the end of the day, is still just a car; it also allows drivers to test the waters of electric vehicle ownership. Kyte will start adding Chevy Bolt EVs and EUVs to its fleet in 2023, but initially only has the Teslas on offer. It’ll be interesting to see if Kyte’s customers are open to paying $600 per month for an unsexy car like a Camry. For Kyte’s sake, I hope so.

After all, subscriptions exist for a reason; they represent a mental shift from ownership to access, and consumers are undoubtedly putting value on hassle-free experiences. For companies, subscriptions can also counter high upfront operation costs — like the cost of leasing and buying a fleet of vehicles — with longer-term customer loyalty. But companies like Kyte that are offering both hardware and services as subscriptions need to be hyper-focused on unit economics and monitor their contribution margins in order to succeed.

Kyte appears to be well-funded for the moment. The company just closed out a $60 million Series B in November and secured $200 million in debt financing earlier this year from Goldman Sachs and Ares Global Management.

On-demand car rental company Kyte is now offering car subscriptions by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

For those on the sidelines, the story of digital advertising over the past couple of years has been as entertaining as a binge-worthy TV series. Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy kicked things off in spring of 2021, and the plot only thickened with rising inflation, a likely recession and an unexpected cast of new ad platform characters: Netflix, Uber, and, curiously, Apple.

While dramatic, these headlines tend to gloss over what’s actually going on: Digital advertising may be in transition, but it is not dead. Consumer brands, especially direct-to-consumer (DTC), continue to rely on digital advertising and there are a growing number of ways to use it well.

Based on our work with hundreds of brands, along with a recent survey of 158 consumer marketing leaders, outlined below is what we know about the current advertising landscape. We’ve also compiled tips for navigating these options to cost-effectively capture revenue this holiday season and beyond.

Setbacks abound, but startups must be even more creative

The chaos of the past year has left advertisers with an ever-changing field of imperfect options and the need to continuously revise their approach. As changes driven by privacy concerns weakened the ability to target consumers, particularly on Facebook, 46% of consumer marketing leaders surveyed by Proxima said “difficulty targeting” and “limited budget” were their top two challenges to marketing effectiveness. About 40% specifically said changes to iOS’ privacy policies had a negative impact on their business.

Not surprisingly, the impact has been disproportionately felt by smaller startups. Among those surveyed, 70% of large companies expect to exceed 2022 revenue goals, but only 52% of SMBs reported similar levels of optimism. The SMBs in the survey were also 20% more likely to report that changes brought by iOS’ privacy policies have had a negative impact on their business.

Dramatic headlines may be masking upside opportunities

It is important for consumer startups to sift the opportunities from the doom and gloom headlines. For example, Meta’s stock price is much less important to you than the number of users on Facebook, which saw 1.93 billion daily active users in Q3 2022.

TikTok is more popular than ever, which is great for brands that want to experiment with a growing platform. But Instagram’s 2 billion monthly active users are hardly a thing of the past, which means the platform still presents a huge opportunity for brand building and engagement.

Despite a rocky road, consumer advertisers are hanging on

Not surprisingly, the levels of satisfaction with ad platforms included in the study — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Google — were notably low, with dissatisfaction rates ranging from 31% to 65% depending on the platform.

5 methods for leveraging digital advertising during a downturn by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

Losing weight sucks. It’s a deeply invidualized experience that’s bogged down by all sorts of societal expectations and fly-by-night promises. Many have amassed fortunes promising silver bullet solutions, all knowing full well that there isn’t any one-size-fits-all solution.

The promise at the heart of Lumen’s offering is a personalized health solution, based on individual metabolism. It’s certainly an appealing one – particularly for those who have struggled to meet their individual weight goals through more traditional methods.

We’ve been following the Israeli firm’s own journey for several years now, including a crowdfunding round, back in 2018. The following year, the company brought in an $8.5 million. Today it’s announcing a $62 million Series B. The round, led by Pitango Venture Capital, is easily the startup’s large to date, bringing its total funding to [tk]. Hanwha Group, Resolute Ventures, RiverPark Ventures, Unorthodox Ventures, Almeda Capital and Disruptive VC also participated.

Lumen developed a handheld hardware device that looks a bit like a vape. A built-in sensor measures the level of CO2 produced to determine “metabolic fuel usage” – whether the body is using burning carbs or far for fuel. It connects to a smartphone and the associated app gives you personalized food, exercise and sleep recommendations.

The company claims it’s able to accomplish in a $250 package (the personalized plans go up from there) what had previously taken expensive lab equipment to do. It’s an appealing promise, for sure.

“Until now, studying metabolism with the standard equipment was challenging for both researchers and participants,” cofounder and chief scientist Merav Mor says in a release. “The data collection was minimal and would require participants to come to a clinic for each measurement and a practitioner to analyze the results. Now researchers can easily collect multiple data points from participants and build more complex research protocols that unveil new physiological findings.”

The company hasn’t offered specific sales figures, but says that two million monthly metabolic measurements are taken using its devices. The new funding will go toward “support[ing] business growth and new research.”

Lumen raises $62M for its handheld weight loss hardware by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch