Month: January 2023

Starbucks will become available for delivery via DoorDash across all 50 U.S. states by March, in an expansion of a partnership with the delivery service announced last year. In September, Starbucks and DoorDash first entered a partnership that would allow customers to order Starbucks items for delivery from their local stores using the DoorDash app. The companies initially tested delivery in select cities, including Atlanta, Sacramento, and Houston. Later, the pilot expanded to other cities, including Seattle, Portland, and New York.

Today, DoorDash announced the Starbucks delivery service will now arrive in more markets, including Northern California, Texas, Georgia, Florida, and others ahead of the nationwide launch.

The move signals Starbucks is finding traction with delivery orders, as DoorDash is not its first delivery partner. Ahead of the DoorDash partnership, Starbucks leveraged Uber Eats for delivery services. The companies began working together in 2018 with a Miami pilot before expanding nationally. By partnering with another delivery provider, the coffee chain is making its products accessible to a wider audience, as not everyone prefers to use Uber Eats as their main delivery app. It could also help the chain find a way to survive a shift to remote work, which reduced the in-person orders from commuters.

“As customer behaviors evolve, we continue to innovate the Starbucks Experience to connect with them through meaningful and valuable digital experiences,” said Brooke O’Berry, Starbucks senior vice president of digital experiences, in a statement. “Our partnership with DoorDash allows us to provide our customers with another convenient way to enjoy Starbucks wherever they are. Delivery continues to be a significant growth opportunity for Starbucks, and we’re excited to reach more customers by partnering with DoorDash, a company known for their best-in-class service,” O’Berry added.

To order Starbucks for delivery, customers won’t use the Starbucks app itself as they would for a mobile pick-up order.

Instead, they’ll use the DoorDash app on iOS or Android, just as if they were ordering from a local restaurant. The app will allow customers to customize their drinks just as they would at Starbucks itself, including being able to choose the amount of syrup, type of milk, and espresso roasts. Starbucks says around 95% of its core menu items will be available through DoorDash.

Of course, ordering yourself a coffee for delivery may not make sense because of the delivery and service fees involved, in addition to the tip. But for customers with a DoorDash membership, the delivery fees are waived. Plus, the service could be a more useful way to handle group orders, like those for staff in a workplace, instead of sending out a person to pick up the coffee orders.

“Our partnership with Starbucks connects even more neighborhoods across the United States with their favorite beverages and bites,” said Sanjay Kotte, head of strategic partnerships at DoorDash, in an announcement. “When you combine the quality of Starbucks handcrafted beverages and food with the logistics power and geographic scale of DoorDash, the result is extraordinary for coffee lovers nationwide,” Kotte said.

In recent months, DoorDash has been working to develop its platform to become more than just a way to order meals from local restaurants. Though a partnership with Walmart wound down last summer, the company has since launched new features like a way for DoorDash drivers to pick up consumers’ e-commerce returns and other packages for drop off at UPS, FedEx or USPS locations. It also introduced a way to combine orders, or “double dash,” by allowing customers to order food and alcohol from different locations on one order.

However, like other tech companies, DoorDash has been hit by the economic downturn, resulting in the layoffs of 1,250 people in November as a cost-cutting measure. The company said it had not been “as rigorous as we should have been” in managing its team growth. DoorDash, similar to many e-commerce players, had grown significantly during the pandemic as customers stayed home and ordered in. But those trends reversed as lockdowns ended and restaurants opened back up for business.

Still, the market for food delivery remained ripe, even after the pandemic impacts lessened. Last year, for example, Amazon took a 2% stake in DoorDash rival Grubhub to offer restaurant delivery through Grubhub+ to Prime customers. This year, however, customers are cutting expenses, including ordering food delivery. The Wall Street Journal reported orders on apps like DoorDash, UberEats and Grubhub were down 5% year-over-year in October and November — the slowest two-month growth since the pandemic.

DoorDash’s stock popped on the news of the Starbucks partnership expansion, and is now up 2% in today’s trading.

DoorDash expands Starbucks partnership with plans to reach all U.S. states by March by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Over the years software pricing has shifted from rigid seat licenses for on-prem legacy software to subscriptions with tiered pricing, as software shifted to the cloud in the early part of this century. The latter helped transform the way we think about pricing and revenue.

Amberflo founder and CEO Puneet Gupta thinks there is a better way to think about software pricing, not based on seats or subscription tiers, but actual usage. That requires a pricing infrastructure to meter all of the different interactions with the product. Gupta started Amberflo to build that tooling to put granular metered pricing within reach of any company.

Today, the company announced a couple of milestones. For starters, it has raised a total of $20 million including a previously unannounced $5 million seed round and a new $15 million Series A. In addition, the company is making the Amberflo platform generally available today.

Gupta saw the metering idea in action when he worked at AWS from 2011-2014, and the idea stuck with him that it was an approach that many companies could benefit from. “I had a chance to build these services [when I was at AWS], and I saw this internal shared services thing called metering. Whenever we built a service, we had to connect to the metering stack. That’s where I became aware, and for me, it was an eye opener,” he told TechCrunch.

In 2020, Gupta started Amberflo to build a metering stack as a service that any customer could tap into. He thinks it should be particularly attractive for product led growth (PLG) companies. “If you are one of those PLG companies, we are providing you with a cloud native, next generation platform that gives you the tools to be effective within that. And then specifically, the tool allows to launch your own usage-based pricing model,” he said.

While we are used to seeing companies meter software to understand things like application performance, page loads or software anomalies, this is specifically designed to measure resource usage. With this kind of metering, companies can then track usage at a granular level down to every transaction, API call or resource used.

Gupta thinks this could transform the way we think about pricing because it gives you the data on which to base your pricing in a very precise way with documentation to back it up. It also gives you the information on exactly how many people are using the software, something that he says you don’t typically see in subscription pricing because there’s little motivation to know the usage once you sell a certain number of licenses.

“In the subscription world, nobody tracks usage. Companies are actually disincentivized to track usage. If I’ve signed you up for 100 users, and you paid me for the 100 users upfront for the first 12 months, why would I track it and tell you that only 36 people have been using it for the first three months into the product? I’m not going to do that,” he said.

He says, usage pricing also gives companies a way to continue working with customers, who might otherwise churn. As Gupta points out, in the subscription world there is the binary of choice of being subscribed or unsubscribing, whereas with usage-based pricing, the customer could dial back usage instead of giving up the product altogether, and he sees that as a big advantage, especially in times like these where CIOs are looking for non-essential products to cut.

The startup currently has a dozen employees, but plans to quadruple in size in the next year with the new funding helping to fuel that growth. As he adds employees to the company, he is trying to build a diverse workplace, but admits it’s challenging.

“It is something we think about, and we pay attention to, but to be honest with you, we don’t have that kind of leverage and luxury right now to sort of institutionalize it as a matter of process,” he said. He added that the company is bringing in its first recruiter this week, which could help, and one of its investors, Norwest Venture Partners, has talked to him about building diversity as a core value, and he plans to take it seriously as the company grows.

The $5 million seed was led by Homebrew, while the $15 million Series A was led by Norwest Venture Partners. Operator Collective also participated.

Amberflo wants to transform SaaS pricing with metered usage by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

Royal Mail CEO Simon Thompson has confirmed that a cyberattack is to blame for the ongoing disruption at the U.K. postal giant.

The admission comes almost a week after Royal Mail first said it was hit by an unspecified “cyber incident” that left the British mail service unable to dispatch items to overseas destinations.

“We’ve confirmed that we’ve had a cyberattack,” Thompson told a U.K. parliamentary committee on Tuesday in response to questions from lawmakers. Thompson added that while the mail service believes that no customer data was compromised in the attack, the organization is prepared for that situation to change and has already notified the U.K. data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office, as a precaution.

Thompson — who gave evidence to lawmakers during a session about Royal Mail’s ongoing dispute with its union workers — declined to comment on specifics of the cyberattack, claiming that discussing details of the incident would be “detrimental” to the ongoing investigation. Thompson said that the postal service continues to experience disruption to its international export services following the cyberattack.

Royal Mail has yet to confirm when this disruption is likely to end — compounded by existing backlogs and delays that have arisen from strike action — but Thompson said a “workaround” should be available soon.

“For export parcels and letters through our postal services… we are no longer able to provide that service,” he said. “The team have been working on workarounds so that we can get the service up and running again,” and said the Royal Mail will have “more news to share” soon.

There remains plenty of unanswered questions about the Royal Mail’s cyberattack, such as the nature of the incident and who is responsible.

Some media reports have claimed that Royal Mail was the target of ransomware that compromised machines used to print customs labels for parcels sent to overseas destinations. A public-facing representative for LockBit, a ransomware group accused of launching the attack on the postal service, initially denied involvement, and pointed blame to other hackers using the gang’s leaked ransomware builder software. Brett Callow, a ransomware expert and threat analyst at Emsisoft, shared a post from the LockBit representative seemingly admitting that a LockBit affiliates were responsible for the attack.

TechCrunch has yet to verify LockBit’s involvement, and Royal Mail has not been listed on the gang’s dark web leak site. When reached by email, Royal Mail spokesperson Mark Street declined to comment.

Royal Mail CEO confirms cyberattack downed UK postal service by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

Disney+ premiered the latest trailer for Season 3 of “The Mandalorian” last night, giving fans a glimpse at what the bounty hunter and his tiny companion will get into this time. The season will make its exclusive debut on the streamer on March 1.

The third season will take place following the events of “The Book of Boba Fett.” The newest trailer features Din Djarin (played by Pedro Pascal) and Grogu back together again, with Grogu showing off his growing power. Din Djarin is on a mission back to Mandalore where he’ll ask them for forgiveness.

Fans will also notice glimpses of new characters like a ton of Mandalorians, a co-pilot droid for Djarin’s N-1, as well as various aliens like Anzellans and Kowakian monkey-lizards. “The Mandalorian” also stars Amy Sedaris, Carl Weathers, Emily Swallow, Giancarlo Esposito and Katee Sackhoff.

The trailer played during halftime of the NFL Super Wild Card matchup, which had the Dallas Cowboys play against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Other “Star Wars” shows that Disney+ subscribers can look forward to this year include future episodes of “Star Wars: The Bad Batch,” “Ahsoka,” “Star Wars Jedi: Survivor” and more.

Disney+ releases full trailer for ‘The Mandalorian’ Season 3 by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

One of two things likely happened here. Either Apple made a proper video before deciding this wasn’t quite enough to justify a proper “event,” or this is just how the company is going to treat smaller announcements, going forward. Given the number of Apple rumors swirling around at the moment, it also seems entirely plausible that on-going supply chain constraints foiled plans for something larger — or, looking at how hardware announcements slowed in the past year, maybe every one becomes a bigger.

Whatever the cause, in addition to the standard newsroom drop, the company this simultaneously dropped a sub-20-minute announcement video titled, “Meet the new MacBook Pro and Mac mini.” If you’re not a fan of reading releases, spec sheets or news reports (whomst among us?), you can watch a bunch of Apple execs and product managers discuss the announcements in typically well-produced video.

The big news this morning is:

New MacBook Pros
A new Mac Mini
New M2 Max and Pro chips to power the above

Go ahead, watch it below. It’s Tuesday morning on a shortened holiday week here in the U.S. No one thought you were going to get any work done regardless.

Now that it’s thoroughly spoiled, here’s Apple’s M2 MacBook Pro ‘event’ video by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

ChatGPT, the AI that can write poems, emails, spreadsheet formulas and more, has attracted a lot of negative publicity lately. Q&A coding site Stack Overflow temporarily banned users from sharing content generated by ChatGPT, saying that the AI made it too easy for users to flood the site with spammy answers. Then, New York City public schools prohibited students and teachers from using ChatGPT on school-owned devices over fears of cheating and misinformation. .

That’s perhaps why AI21 Labs, an Israeli startup developing text-generating AI systems along the lines of ChatGPT, tried a different tack with its newly-released assistive writing tool, Wordtune Spices. A part of AI21’s expanding suite of generative AI, Wordtune Spices doesn’t compose emails and essays like ChatGPT. Instead, it suggests options that change the voice and style of already-written sentences, also offering up statistics from web-based sources to “strengthen arguments.”

“We see new amazing AI capabilities introduced on a weekly basis — [AI systems] that generate images, audio and text in a convincing human-seeming manner,” Ori Goshen, the co-CEO and co-founder of AI21 Labs, told TechCrunch via email. “With all the excitement, for these systems to become useful, they need to be robust, reliable and explainable.”

To that end, Wordtune Spices cites its work for each tidbit of information it profers, providing users with links back to the original sources. That’s one better than ChatGPT, which doesn’t always — or correctly — name sources and even sometimes points to sources that don’t actually exist.

AI21 says it developed “grounding and attribution” algorithms to search for relevant sources to base Wordtune Spices’ responses on and present the source links alongside info. The tool can help write a thesis statement and main ideas, including explanations and counterarguments, as well as provide analogies and creative expressions like jokes and quotes.

Users can choose from different cues (e.g. “legal,” “health care”) to prompt Wordtune Spices to suggest rewrites appropriate for particular professional documents. But Goshen says that Spices was designed to address a wide array of use cases, from writing essays and working on blog posts to drafting financial reports.

“Spices isn’t a tool that generates a full essay with one click, because we don’t think this helps create strong writers,” Goshen said. “Instead, we equip the user with a toolbox of language and storytelling tools for them to craft their text to perfection by making decisions on their own from a host of possibilities.”

But how well does Wordtune Spices work in practice, and is it better than the other AI-powered assistive writing tools out there?

Writer is among those tools — it employs an AI engine that evaluates key metrics such as plagiarism, sentence complexity, formality and active voice usage. Grammarly offers style and tone suggestions. So does Ginger, ProWritingAid and Slick Write.

This reporter wasn’t able to test Spices prior to its release due to technical issues on AI21’s end. But from a brief demo video, the rewriting feature appeared to work well enough minus the occasional grammatical error. To follow the sentence “It’s no secret that artificial intelligence tools have become one of the latest trends in content writing, blogging and copywriting as a whole,” Spices suggested “Some people, like content writers, may be scared of AI, but it can help you create high-quality content with a minimum of effort [sic].”

Spices cited an article from The New York Times in suggesting the sentence, but Goshen admits that there might be cases where the tool “[misses] information that should have been validated.” He also stressed that, while there are filters and “other measures” in place to try to prevent Spices from outputting toxic or biased text — a problem for text-generating tools like ChatGPT — the model might “make mistakes” all the same.

“We have been working on smart filters and other measures … We also tried to preemptively block any trolling attempts in that regard,” Goshen added. “That being said, Spices isn’t bulletproof, especially because it’s hard to train a [system] to make sensitive decisions that sometimes even humans struggle with.”

Goshen says that AI21 plans to put “a lot of focus” on moderation and “make it more robust” as Spices evolves. But for AI-curious writer holding out for the perfect system, Spices probably isn’t it — even if it works roughly as advertised.

AI21 Labs intros an AI writing assistant that cites its sources by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Conventional startup perspectives on intellectual property rights and exit events often recite the anecdotal experience of software founders operating in industries dominated by strong network effects and natural monopolies. These unique circumstances often lead to first-mover advantages that displace consideration of intellectual property protection strategies.

However, overreliance on conventional wisdom also allows valuation destroying timebombs to hide within successful businesses, only to detonate during a liquidity event as the buyer or investor counsel begins due diligence.

At hardware startups or startups in markets without natural monopolies, stronger appreciation of intellectual property strategies may inoculate companies against these mistakes. Non-software startups frequently receive advice that — perhaps inadvertently — pushes them along a favorable path for massive exit valuations.

However, as an IP and deal lawyer, I have seen a few recurring false steps that harm valuation across domains, even if hardware startups often avoid the worst offenses.

With this in mind, here ara a few cost-effective IP strategies that you may employ to optimize your exit valuation.

Use advanced patent strategies to preserve rights and “keep doors open”

Beta testing activity often triggers patent filing deadlines that cannot be unwound. The practice is understandable, as cost management is typically critical during pre-revenue beta activity.

However, startups should consider using provisional patent applications followed by Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) patent applications to defer patent costs when pre-revenue and avoid the negative effects that missing these critical patent deadlines will have if the beta proves to be successful.

Filing cheap provisional patent applications early and often, then combining them in tranches within a fewer number of PCT patent applications, allows startups to defer the expensive “back-and-forth” prosecution part of patenting for as long as 30 or 31 months from the time the initial provisional patent application was filed.

The goal is to allow the product to mature sufficiently so that you can focus on only the IP that’s will spur revenue. Companies following this strategy typically obtain fewer, higher-quality patents, and often see better value because fewer good patents often cost less than many, lower-quality patents.

This strategy also maximizes flexibility if an acquirer, investor or early significant customer takes the product in a new direction. Because it can be worse to obtain patents that cover a product that the market, investors or customers no longer want than to obtain no patents at all, this strategy uses legal, procedural strategies to manage the patent timeline and facilitate later-stage pivots.

Audit early prototyping activity and ensure everyone involved signs an assignment of rights

Many deals have been stymied by an early independent contractor who signed a form NDA the founder found online, but which omitted an assignment of rights clause.

Sometimes, critical early vendors become more important to the success of a product than was initially appreciated, and agreements with these vendors may have deal-killing clauses. For instance, a hosting provider may have a non-assignment clause that limits future stock or asset sale transactions. You should find out if you have such agreements right now, not on the eve of a huge exit.

Cost-effective IP strategies can lead to massive exit valuations by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

Anna Raptis, founder and CEO at Mexico-based venture capital firm Amplifica Capital, was always someone who’s been “interested in facilitating economic development.”

Born in Australia, she followed that lead, holding positions with the United Nations and the World Bank, spending two decades working in the energy sector. That’s what ultimately brought her to Mexico: a focus on providing access to clean, safe and reliable energy as a way to help the country develop and improve people’s lives.

Her background in investing in building and developing investment opportunities, along with a notion to change the narrative around the lack of female tech entrepreneurs in Mexico, was what pushed her into venture capital.

She started out investing as an angel and in a couple of funds to learn more, with a focus on companies looking to solve important problems in Latin America.

“There are so many challenges, which means there are so many opportunities,” Raptis told TechCrunch. “Through investing in tech in Latin America, we can really make a difference in people’s lives.”

Raptis started Amplifica in 2020, the name inspired by the thesis of “celebrating, magnifying and amplifying the success of female founders in the region.”

In fact, her focus is on what she called “gender lens investing,” a concept driven by the notion that you can get better returns through investing in diversity. Amplifica invests mainly in teams where there are female founders or co-founders or goods and services focused on women. If a founder is not a woman, she does look deeper at the leadership team and to see what policies and practices they have in place supporting women.

“I was very inspired by a lot of women in the U.S. building similar funds because I haven’t seen anything like this,” she added. “These women showed me what was possible, and we know that when women see others have success it motivates them to think they can have a try.”

Raptis is a solo general partner working with a staff of five and began raising capital for her first fund, which recently closed with $11 million in capital commitments, exceeding its $10 million target. This fund has nearly 100 investors, including Mexico Ventures (a joint venture between Fondo de Fondos and Sun Mountain Capital); Grupo Herdez; Maria Ariza, CEO of BIVA; Melanie Devlyn, CEO of Devlyn Holdings; Daniel Undurraga and Oskar Hjertonsson, founders of Cornershop; and Loreanne Garcia co-founder of Kavak.

She explained that there are a lot of new funds in Mexico, but believes Amplifica’s success in raising money was because its focus on female founders is unique.

However, that aspect was also what made it a challenge, she recalls.

“People were skeptical because this is something that people had not seen in Mexico before,” Raptis said. There were a lot of questions around that, like, ‘Is Mexico really ready for a fund like this?’ and what would it mean to be investing in women in tech.”

Amplifica has invested in 10 companies so far, including inter-city mobility services startup Kolors, Verqor, focused on agricultural financing for inputs, and Mujer Financiera, an Argentine company providing tools for financial inclusion for women. In addition, Raptis wants to invest in 10 to 15 more companies in the next two years.

“We’ve had a lot of support from the VC ecosystem in Latin America, and we want to be the fund that the best female entrepreneurs in tech, in Latin America, reach out to first,” she added.

Amplifica Capital ‘wants to be fund that Latin America’s female tech founders reach out to first’ by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Komunal is reaching out to Indonesia’s rural customers by going where they are. The fintech partners with more than 220 banks in tier 2 and tier 3 cities spread through 19 provinces. Founded in 2019, the startup announced today it has raised $8.5 million in funding led by East Ventures Growth Fund, with participation from AlphaTrio Sustainable Technology Fund, Skystar Capital, Sovereign’s Capital, Ozora and Gobi Partners.

Komunal digitizes rural banks, called BPRs (Bank Perkreditan Rakyat) through its DepositoBPR platform, which lets users make deposits and apply for loans digitally without needing to visit their bank’s physical location. In addition to DepositoPR, Komunal also has a peer-to-peer lending platform that connects MSMEs with lenders.

The startup says that in 2022, its platform channeled IDR 3.6 billion, or about $230 million USD, in deposits and loans to BPRs and MSMEs, representing a 350% year-over-year growth from $50 million in 2021. It expects transaction volume to reach more than $500 million USD by this year, and has recorded positive EBITDA since October 2022.

Komunal was founded three years ago as an SME financing platform based in Surabaya, East Java. CEO Hendry Lieviant told TechCrunch that the startup initially benefited from little competition because most lending fintechs were based in Jakarta, but then they realized that lack of data and Indonesian SME culture might limit its scalability.

Another opportunity presented itself in the form of Indonesia’s 1,500 BPRs. “They have strong local connectivity, but their recent performance has been lukewarm, unable to catch up with digitalization,” said Lieviant. “Combined they only made up about 2% of the Indonesian banking market although they have much bigger potential.”

Customers access banks through the DepositoBPR app. From there, they are able to choose their rural bank and deposit product, create a virtual account and transfer money directly into it. Lieviant said they can also get government-guaranteed deposits with higher interest rates.

Komunal’s new funding will be used to market DepositoBPR and build its core banking system for rural banks. The company also announced it has appointed Dr. Peter Jacobs, a former executive director of Bank Indonesia, as its commissioner, and will continue to hire for senior positions.

Komunal raises $8.5M to digitize Indonesia’s rural banks by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Apple’s M2 Mac Mini arrives January 24, starting at $599 by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch