Month: January 2023

Autonomous vehicle technology may no longer be the fuel powering the hype machine. But companies applying the technology to agriculture, commercial and logistics applications are still attracting venture capital.

Take Outrider, a Golden, Colorado startup developing autonomous electric yard trucks, for example.

Distribution yards are the nerve center of the supply chain. Its where all those goods (like those ordered from Amazon and other e-commerce businesses) make the transition from long-haul trucks to warehouses, and eventually to the consumer. Workers today use diesel-powered yard trucks to move trailers filled with goods around the yard as well as to and from loading docks.

Outrider has developed an autonomous system that includes an electric yard truck, software to manage the operations and site infrastructure. While humans may still be needed at the distribution yard, the autonomous system handles the bulk of the work, including hitching and unhitching trailers, connecting and disconnecting trailer brake lines and monitoring trailer locations.

The revenue potential from this system — there are some 400,000 distribution yards in the U.S. alone — has caught the attention of a number of investors. Outrider recently closed a $73 million Series C round led by FM Capital and attracted new investors Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and NVIDIA’s venture capital group, NVentures. New investors B37 Ventures, Lineage Ventures, Presidio Ventures, the venture arm of Sumitomo Corporation and ROBO Global Ventures also joined along with existing backers Koch Disruptive Technologies and New Enterprise Associates.

Outrider has raised $191 million since its founding in 2017 under the name Azevtec.

The company has made some progress since its last raise in fall 2020. Outrider founder and CEO Andrew Smith told TechCrunch that the yard trucks have new hardware designed to handle harsh environments, including robotic arms. Outrider has 20 autonomous systems in use at customer sites and its test facility as the company finishes the final capabilities and proprietary safety mechanisms of the system, Smith said.

These final tweaks to the system will wrap up in 2023, he added. From there the focus will be launching commercial operations with its customers, which includes Georgia Pacific and other unnamed companies that have invested in joint product testing and pilot operations since 2019. Smith said Outrider’s customers represent more than 20% of all yard trucks operating in North America.

The new funds will be used to hire in the U.S. and internationally (beyond its 175-person workforce)and transition from testing and validation to commercial operations at scale, Smith said.

“It’s one thing to have a vehicle driving autonomously, it’s another thing to create a truly industrial system that can operate in a harsh environment over multiple years of time, 20 to 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” Smith said.” The productization of the system and the rolling in of these final capabilities will allow us to then scale to thousands of systems operating on Outrider software over the next few years.”

Outrider raises $73M to brings its autonomous electric yard trucks into the mainstream by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

The teenage market for apps is a tough nut to crack and stay relevant in. Just ask Snapchat. Equally, teens are going through a stage in life where almost every social interaction seems to carry portent of some kind of other. This would explain in part why apps like SendIt, NGL, and Nocapp (some are Snapchat connected tools) took off as ways for teens to anonymously comment on each other. And AskFM would probably like us all to forget the various suicides that occurred when it was released in its initial form, back in the day. (And you thought Instagram is bad for mental health…).

Meanwhile, somehow (somehow!?) a new startup has appeared with the idea that yet another app is going to help this dumpster fire of social interactions, but let’s hear them out before jumping to conclusions.

“Slay” bills itself as a “positive social media network for teenagers”. The reason we are talking about it today is that it’s grown like a weed after launching last year in Germany, where it reached Number 1 on the German iOS App Store four days after launch. It’s now claiming to have over 250,000 registered users and claims its gaining traction in other countries including the UK, where it recently launched.

So what’s the attraction here? When users open the app it shows users 12 questions which the user can only answer by choosing another user (from their school, class or peer group) to pay an anonymous compliment to (or “slay”). For example, the app may ask a user “Who inspires me to do my best?”. They can then choose from four other users from their school to pay this ‘slay’ to. They can then view compliments from other kids, provided they answer the 12 questions when logging on. The identity of those who sent the compliment remains hidden.

This reminds me of BeReal’s mechanic, where you can only see other people’s BeReal photos by uploading your own.

And Slay is also not dissimilar to Gas, the messaging platform popular among teens for its positive spin on social media, acquired by Discord yesterday. On Gas, anonymous polling is intended to boost users’ confidence.

The other reason Slay has popped onto the TC radar, is that its growth has attracted the interest of VCs.

It’s now raised a $2.63m (€2.5m) pre-seed funding round led by Accel. Also participating was 20VC. Additional investors including Supercell Co-Founder and CEO Ilkka Paananen, Behance founder Scott Belsky, football star Mario Götze, Kevin Weil (Scribble Ventures) and musician Alex Pall (The Chainsmokers).

Slay says it is aiming to reset the teen relationship with social apps by re-balancing things away from the negative sentiments on social platforms, by normalising the giving of compliments. It also says it’s been designed with safety, content moderation and teenage mental wellbeing built in. We shall see…

Digging into the app, one can see that it’s been built very simply as a ‘compliment app’. Whether that is going to be enough to keep users coming back is hard to say. Teenager behaviour is hard to second guess. Getting zero can also send a ‘signal’, for instance.

Suffice it to say, Slay claims it will “never sell or share personal data with third parties.” Given the history of social apps, let’s see how long this lasts.

There is also no direct messaging facility, although users will be able to add links to social media profiles, so clearly they will be able message each other eventually, off-app.

Adults are supposedly not allowed to ‘join’ schools, and approximate location is asked for to suggest nearby schools. Any questions and interactions are asked by the app, not by users themselves.

SLAY was founded in 2022 by a team of three 23-year old, Berlin-based co-founders: Fabian Kamberi, Jannis Ringwald and Stefan Quernhorst. The idea was Kamberi’s, who had been building consumer apps since he was a teenager, and says he was inspired by the experiences of his siblings struggled with the negativity of social media apps during the COVID-19 pandemic.

CEO and Co-founder Kamberi, told me via email: “We see Slay in the future not only as an anonymous polling app [referring to the aforementioned Gas], but as the go-to spot for teens to rediscover social interactions in various play modes.”

“Our app is similar to Gas, and their acquisition shows a great proof of what we have built and what is in store for the future in our space. However, apps that rely solely on anonymous Q&A, for example, carry a high cyberbullying risk, which – by contrast – we prevent through our rigorous content moderation as well as specially designed gamemodes,” he added.

But the question is, why does he think a social app can improve mental health when so many social apps have not?

“We have received thousands of feedback messages from users thanking us for making them feel valued in times of fast moving, negative social media interactions,” he told me.

He said the startup could well ship new features which might create more engagement but at the same time it might bring a risk for negativity: “So we focus very much on the individual experience that each user has, aiming to make it as positive as possible.” He said the startup’s job is “content safety.”

So what’s Slay’s business model? How will it make money? Kamberi says it will likely be premium features, services or tools which users pay for: “We are currently building several exclusive, paid play modes as well as add ons, which we will release through feedback cycles with users and supported by data.”

SLAY is available in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Julien Bek, Principal at Accel, added via a statement: “We’re extremely impressed by the SLAY app, both in its immediate popularity among teenagers and the team’s positive goal of improving teenage mental health in the digital world. Already, the SLAY team has seen almost half its active users use it every school day.”

German teens went crazy for this ‘compliments’ app, and now VCs are backing its next phase by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

Oro, an open source ecommerce platform co-created by Magento’s cofounder and former CTO, today announced it has raised $13 million in a strategic growth round of funding.

Founded in 2012, Los Angeles-based Oro’s platform constitutes a range of applications, including OroCommerce, its flagship B2B ecommerce platform for building storefronts and marketplaces; OroMarketplace, an end-to-end management platform specifically for marketplace businesses; a customer relationship management platform (CRM) called OroCRM; and OroPlatform, a rapid web app development platform.

While similar players in the space such as Shopify and Magento largely (though not exclusively) focus on B2C brands, Oro targets its ecommerce infrastructure squarely at B2B companies such as manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and wholesalers. This, according to Oro CEO and cofounder Yoav Kutner, is more complex to execute than B2C.

“B2B ecommerce has a very different dynamic to B2C commerce — instead of high-volume transactional purchases with a rotating cast of consumers, B2B brands focus on high-value deals with a smaller group of loyal customers,” Kutner told TechCrunch. “As such, B2B digital commerce solutions need to be able to accommodate the complex needs of business buyers, with large orders, split shipments, customized quotes, and many other capabilities, while also supporting rich ongoing customer engagement and personalized offerings.”

But on top of all that, B2B buyers now expect the kind of usability they have become accustomed to with B2C platforms they may use elsewhere in their everyday lives, which means that B2B merchants have had to up their game.

“One of the key challenges is delivering robust and feature-rich enterprise-grade sales tools, while also delivering a consumer-grade purchasing experience, with sleek and streamlined discovery, purchasing, and tracking options,” Kutner added.

Things get even more complex when you consider that a single seller might have completely different and distinct markets for their goods. Kutner cited an example involving a glassware manufacturer, who might have to introduce separate sales portals targeting the medical and catering sectors, for instance. This also might require the seller to set different pricing structures for each vertical, something that Oro enables through a so-called “dynamic pricing engine” that automatically calculates new prices or discounts based on pre-set rules and business logic defined by the seller.

“Coordinating those operations behind the scenes brings special challenges for B2B companies and ecommerce providers,” Kutner said.

The story so far

Alongside two cofounders Jary Carter and Dima Soroka, Kutner launched Oro a little more than a decade ago shortly after leaving Magento which he’d sold to eBay the previous year for around $180 million. Adobe ended up buying Magento for $1.68 billion in 2018 and rebranded it as Adobe Commerce.

Oro is a similar proposition to Magento in several ways, perhaps chief among them being its open source foundations which affords more flexibility over things like hosting and deployment, while also allowing companies to tweak and adapt things to their own use-cases.

This means that companies can host Oro on their own infrastructure if they wish, or deploy it across any combination of on-premises or public and private clouds.

“Users can also easily and rapidly switch between deployment models — for example, if an on-premises customer needs to rapidly scale up, and leverage private or public cloud infrastructure in response to a spike in web traffic,” Kutner said. “And our hybrid approach also puts customers in control of their data: if they want to run most workloads in the cloud, but operate their own secure data center, for instance, Oro makes that entirely possible. There’s really no limit to the ways that customers can leverage our hosting options to suit their needs.”

Prior to now, Oro had raised $12 million back in 2016, and with another $13 million in the bank, Kutner said that the company plans to “shake up the digital commerce industry for many years to come.”

Oro’s latest cash injection was led by Zubr Capital, with participation from existing investor Highland Europe.

Oro, an open-source B2B ecommerce platform from Magento’s cofounder, raises $13M by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch