Month: January 2023

Running a data center means that you have to find innovative ways to manage heat from the servers. And French startup Qarnot is standardizing its process to reuse fatal heat and turn it into an asset.

While the startup has been around for a while, Qarnot now wants to reach the next level. It has raised a €12.5 million funding round ($13.3 million at today’s exchange rate). It has also negotiated a €22.5 million credit line ($24 million) to finance its future projects.

Société Générale Ventures, ADEME Investissement, Demeter, la Banque des Territoires and Colam Impact are participating in today’s funding round.

Qarnot started with electric heaters for construction companies looking for heaters for their new buildings. The company put servers in those heaters so that CPUs and other components would generate heat. The rest of the heater would act as a passive cooling system and warm residential and office buildings.

At the other end, companies such as BNP Paribas, Société Générale and 3D animation studio Illumination are renting those servers for their own needs. This is an innovative way of building decentralized data centers.

“Ever since we launched Qarnot 12 years ago, our goal has been to valorize fatal heat from computers. Today, it’s a hot topic and there are a lot of people talking about it,” co-founder and CEO Paul Benoit told me.

But the main issue with this system is that you don’t need a heater all year round. Qarnot has found a way to counter this seasonality effect by building a new product —scalable boiler systems.

These modules pack up to 12 servers with a standard form factor based on Open Compute Project server designs with AMD Epyc and Intel Xeon CPUs. Each module is then connected to the water system so that cold water enters the module and is turned into hot water. Up to 95% of computer waste heat is turned into hot water.

I asked about the seasonality of central heating boilers. And it turns out that heating networks work all year round. For instance, they produce hot water, which is always required.

“We want to tackle the baseload. We’re going to run all year round and the heating network is going to rely on a complimentary source,” Benoit said. Buildings or neighborhoods are still going to use electricity or natural gas directly for those cold winter nights.

Qarnot can provide multiple modules and make them work in parallel. It generates more hot water and it increases the total compute power of the Qarnot platform.

“The idea is that we should be able to deploy data centers in locations where people consume heat. It’s a completely different approach compared to traditional data centers,” Benoit said.

Clients include social landlords, property developers, local authorities, swimming pools and heating network operators. Qarnot already rolled out a pilot data center in Finland with 100kW of compute. It’s a small data center, but the company is already looking at other locations with 500kW up to a few MW of compute capacity.

“With our system, you don’t need a cooling system and we can sell the heat that is generated from our servers. In the data center industry, when you have servers that require 1kW, they also require up to 500W in air conditioning,” Benoit said.

And this is key to understanding Qarnot’s appeal. From a business perspective, Qarnot uses electricity in two different ways. It runs computers and it sells heat, which is great for the company’s bottom line. From an environmental perspective, Qarnot greatly improves the carbon footprint of data centers.

“We think the future looks like a plethora of mid-sized data centers. Edge computing is slowly showing up. Today, we don’t really know how it’s going to look like but we know that there are operators looking for hundreds of data centers with a few kilowatts of capacity,” Benoit said.

Qarnot could profoundly change the data center industry. If the company becomes massively successful, there would be no reason to construct dedicated buildings to host hundreds of thousands of computers anymore.

Qarnot creates green data centers by putting servers in central heating boilers by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

Supermom, a parenting platform with 20 million users in six Southeast Asian countries, offers parents price comparisons, communities and the chance to earn money by completing surveys. For brands, it gives them a way to conduct market research and collect first-party data, which is important as marketers prepare for a post-cookie world.

The Singapore-based startup announced today it has raised an oversubscribed Series A of $8 million SGD (about $6 million USD) led by Qualgro, with participation from AC Ventures. Supermom currently has a presence in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand, and plans to expand into more markets. Over 200 consumer brands use Supermom for marketing research, including Kimberly Clark, Procter & Gamble and Philips.

Supermom was founded by Joan Ong, Luke Lim, Lynn Yeoh and Rebecca Koh, and originally started as a platform in 2013 for community groups and in-person events. “Motherhood is quite a lonely journey and I wanted to support other parents,” said Ong. The next five years were focused on Singapore. Then in 2019, Supermom’s team decided they wanted to scale across Southeast Asia, so they pivoted their focus from community events to digital marketing.

Supermom’s market research platform for businesses lets brands perform market testing with very targeted groups of people. Its backend tracks the demographics of parents in its database, including aggregated data about the age of their kids, their occupations and interests. In addition to writing reviews or participating in surveys, parents can apply to be brand ambassadors through Supermom, and when they do, brands can see their number of followers on social media and what groups they are in.

Lim says that quantitative surveys of about 1,000 people usually takes months to put together, but can be done within an hour through Supermom. Surveys can be launched simultaneously in six countries, with specific users invited to take them. To set up a survey, brands select a country, then filter for specific demographics like age of kids. Supermom’s platform also guides them through the process of writing questions.

In addition to their own surveys, brands also get information like brand indexing, or a ranking of which brands are most trusted by consumers. That data can be broken down by demographic—for example, researchers can see if a brand is used by 50% of mothers aged over 30 years, and then narrow that down by disposable income level.

Supermom will use its new funding on its data and product capabilities, and expansion in Southeast Asia.

“As companies all move into a cookieless world, having direct access to consumers is very, very important,” said Ong. “Because they can no longer do retargeting and use cookies to target consumers. So with the millions of users that we have, we are helping a lot of brands to get this critical first-party data so they can actually access their target audience.”

In a statement about the financing, Qualgro general partner Weisheng Neo said, “We recognize the current gap in brands’ access to reliable, secure data on parents, a large and growing customer segment. Brands will find the Supermom platform to be a treasure trove of insights and first-party data activation.”

Singapore-based Supermom helps parenting brands navigate a post-cookie world by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

About a decade ago, Donghwan Kim helped his cousin, a ceramist, look for sales channels, like flea markets, to sell his ceramics. But they had a hard time locating a suitable platform, so after about a year, Kim decided to create a marketplace for handmade goods himself in South Korea called Backpackr.

Today, Backpackr, which operates handmade marketplace calledidus, has raised a $16 million (20 billion won) extension to its Series C financing, two-and-a-half years after its first Series C, which was $24 million (about 30 billion won).

The startup is now valued at approximately $240.1 million post-money, according to sources familiar with the situation. Backpackr said it has raised a total of $56.8 million since its 2012 inception but declined to disclose its valuation. Returning investor Altos Ventures led the extension along with Stone Bridge and new investors Axiom Asia and Vanderbilt University.

The new capital will help Backpackr make a foray into Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines, in the second quarter of this year with an ambition to become the Etsy of Asia, Kim said in an interview with TechCrunch. Backpackr also plans to use the proceeds to invest in R&D to advance its artificial intelligence–powered search and recommendation system, as well as hire additional employees.

The startup intends to sell products made in South Korea overseas and bring handmade products made in Southeast Asia to South Korea via its platform. Other countries like Japan and the U.S. are on its radar for the following destinations, according to Kim. Backpackr will have to compete with other handmade marketplaces in Asia like Japan-based Minne and Creema, Taiwan-based Pinkoi and Singapore-headquartered Carousell. The market size of Asia’s handmade products is projected to reach $307.8 billion in 2027, up from $149 billion in 2021.

The company not only has idus as a primary business but also operates a crowdfunding platform called Tumblbug which it acquired in 2020. Backpackr also has launched a Patreon-like creator subscription service, Steadio, to connect artists with their fans, Kim said. Backpackr’s model is to aim for a one-stop-shop platform for its creators, which is the company’s key differentiator, Kim pointed out.

“We want to make it a one-stop-shop platform for creators, letting our users (creators) open their own internet boutiques selling their craftworks, including handicrafts and anything homemade like bakery, soap, candles, jewelry, fragrances, bags, furniture, home decor and art, help them crowdfund for their products and connect the creators with fans to offer online or offline classes,” Kim told TechCrunch.

Backpackr, which had about 60,000 creators as of November last year, says it surpassed $804 million in gross merchandise volume in November and passed a break-even point in the second half of last year, though it still posted loss-making in the fiscal year of 2022. The outfit expects to generate profits this year, Kim said.

Korean handmade goods marketplace Backpackr gears up to expand into Southeast Asia by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! We’re hitting the ground running at TC HQ, and it seems the space industry is, too — there was a lot of news, which means a lot to get to in this issue! Read on for more.

In this issue:

A catch-up with Impulse Space
SpaceX kicks off 2023 launch with Transporter-6
News from Momentus, the Indian Space Research Organization and more

Impulse Space will hitch a ride on SpaceX’s Transporter-9 for first mission later this year

In-space transportation startupImpulse Spacewill head to orbit aboard a SpaceX rideshare mission later this year, as it seeks to prove out its orbital maneuvering and servicing technology for the first time.

While there’s always major pressure before an inaugural demonstration, there will likely be more eyes on Impulse’s mission than usual. That’s not least because the startup is headed by Tom Mueller, SpaceX’s former head of propulsion, a formidable engineer who led the development of the Merlin engine that powers the Falcon 9 rocket — the very rocket Impulse will use to reach space.

Impulse will first send its first orbital service vehicle to space to test its propulsion, payload delivery and hosting, software, communications and maneuvering capabilities. That spacecraft, called Mira, will hitch a ride on SpaceX’s Transporter-9 rideshare mission in the fourth quarter of this year, the company announced today.

Startups go to space for the first time on SpaceX’s Transporter-6 mission

SpaceX launched more than 100 payloads to orbit on a Falcon 9 last Tuesday, the sixth mission of its small-sat rideshare program. But while the rocket company is now an old hand at launches — SpaceX just completed a record year with 61 launches in 2022 alone — for a handful of space startups, Transporter-6 marked a milestone.

Those startups includeLauncher, which is conducting its first space tug mission;Magdrive, which is providing an inaugural in-orbit tech demonstration; andEpic Aerospace, which also launched a space tug for the first time. Transporter-6 also carried satellites for Planet Labs and Spire Global, as well as other payloads for scientific, research and commercial customers.

More news from TC and beyond

Blue Originmay have left up a job description for a secret space tug project for a little too long… Ars Technica got wind. (Ars Technica)
Intuitive Machineswill fly a rover for Japan-based robotics company Dymon on its second mission to the moon. The Yaoki rover will head to the lunar south pole on Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander sometime in the latter half of this year. (Intuitive Machines)
Iridium is teaming up with Qualcomm to bring satellite connectivity to several new smartphones running Android this year. (The Washington Post)
ispace’sHAKUTO-R Mission 1 lunar lander successfully executed its second orbital controlmaneuver, keeping it on track to reach the moon sometime this spring. (ispace)
John Deereis finalizing a satellite partner, as the agriculture machinery company looks to create its geospatial data product for farmers. (CNBC)
Microsoftand theIndian Space Research Organizationhave signed an MOU to give Indian space startups free access to the technology behemoth’s cloud tools. (TechCrunch)
NorthStar Earth and Spaceclosed a $35 million Series C for its space-based space situational awareness constellation. The round was led by Cartesian. (NorthStar)
SpaceXis raising $750 million at a $137 billion valuation, with Andreessen Horowitz likely leading the round, according to emails. (CNBC)
Virgin Orbitis looking at a launch date as soon as January 9 for its inaugural mission from the United Kingdom (and the U.K.’s first space flight, ever). (SpaceNews)
Voyager Spacelanded a new partner for its private space station, Starlab: Airbus Defense and Space.Airbus “will provide technical design support and expertise” for the space station, which Voyager says will launch in 2028. (Voyager)

Max Q is brought to you by me, Aria Alamalhodaei. If you enjoy reading Max Q, consider forwarding it to a friend.

Max Q: Hitting the ground running by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch

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Welcome to the beginning of the week. My thumb got smashed in my standup waffle iron while I was cleaning it this morning, so it can only get better from there, right? Anyway, here’s what’s in store for today. — Christine

The TechCrunch Top 3

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…: Vista Equity Partners has plans to take Duck Creek Technologies private. The private equity firm announced its plan to acquire the insurance software company for $2.6 billion. Paul has more.
This is a Releaf: Nigerian agritech Releaf bagged $3.3 million in additional capital as it launches new technology for food processing, starting with oil palm, Tage reports.
The Superscript was on the wall: London-based Superscript, a small business insurance provider, raised $54 million amid a particularly hard year for the sector, Paul writes.

Startups and VC

Attention has our attention. The company raised $3.1 million to continue developing its technology, which combines artificial intelligence with natural language processing to help sales reps sell faster by automatically filling in customer relationship management forms and drafting follow-up emails, Catherine writes.

Here’s four more for you:

Git smart: XetHub raises $7.5 million for its Git-based data collaboration platform, Frederic reports.
Footloose and fancy free: TikTok stars Charli and Dixie D’Amelioare building a business empire and will see the fruits of their labor in May when their new footwear line launches, Sarah reports.
Raising big bucks: Venture capital deployment has slowed down, and now there is talk that the same might happen for VC funds. However, if anyone can raise additional money, it’s perhaps Khosla Ventures, which I wrote announced its intent to raise nearly $3 billion across three new funds.
“Checkout” this company’s strategy: FLIK secured $1.1 million in pre-seed funding to provide a unified checkout solution so that sellers in Southeast Asia can have more control over data, Catherine reports.

5 cloud trends to track in 2023

Despite the downturn, Gartner estimates that global IT spending will reach $4.6 trillion this year, a year-over-year increase of 5.1%.

Josh Berman, president of C2C Global, has identified five trends that cloud technology startups should keep in mind as they create product, fundraising and hiring plans for the new year.

“The promise of these technologies is too significant to ignore,” writes Berman.

Two more from the TC+ team:

Capital cometh: Mary Ann talked to five companies that bootstrapped their way to big businesses before answering the VC knock at the door.
You are what you eat: “If you’ve been seeing a slew of new alternative meat and animal products popping up in your grocery store, Lisa Feria is at least partially to thank,” said Tim in his interview with the plant-based-foods investor on how she remains bullish on this sector.

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

Lauren takes us streaming service by streaming service to show us what each has up its sleeve in 2023. However, if you’re trying to get Disney+ Basic on Roku, you may have to wait a little longer.

And we have five more for you:

Apple has been busy: Its mixed-reality headset could arrive this year, Romain reports. Meanwhile, Lauren writes about Apple Maps teaming up with parking app SpotHero to give users access to 8,000 parking options, and Aisha tells us why iOS 17 may have fewer major changes than initially planned.
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the anime stream: Lauren details the anime streaming services you need to try in 2023.
Truck porn: Stellantis has us drooling over all of the flashy features stuffed into the Ram 1500 Revolution EV truck. Kirsten has more.
Up, up, and away: Get ready to see Virgin Orbit attempt the first orbital launch from British soil, Devin reports.
Q&A: Virginia senator Mark Warner spoke to Brian about cybersecurity, Musk’s Twitter and legislating killer robots.

Daily Crunch: In an all-cash transaction, private equity firm buys insurtech startup Duck Creek for $2.6B by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

I can’t get it out of my head: A honkingly big Caterpillar sign that read, “JOIN US AS WE BUILD A BETTER WORLD.” The digital recruitment billboard at CES 2023 followed promos for an autonomous compactor and excavator, and proceeded another callout: “CHECK OUT OUR BIG AUTONOMOUS TRUCK .”

I did, and boy was it ever.

A “better world” could mean anything in corporate-speak, but in this case, the company is talking specifically about sustainability — and using aspirational language to distance itself from a fossil-fueled role in carving up the earth. Like Caterpillar, many of the exhibitors I saw as I walked the tech-show floor seemed to be rinsing their brands via earthly taglines, stock photos of crops and sunbeams, plastic trees and/or AstroTurf. I find this sort of thing especially distracting now that climate is my main beat, and that’s unfortunate, because there was still lots of intriguing climate (and adjacent) tech on display this year, tucked in among the vague evocations of nature.

When I arrived in Vegas my colleague Ingrid asked if the show would feature mostly adaptive tech (for coping with the consequences of climate change) or mitigative tech (for direct emission cuts). I saw a mix of both, but much of what caught my attention skewed toward adaption. And to that end, this year CES practically overflowed with portable batteries and solar gear for campers and preppers alike. Really, there was no escape.

Highlights included EcoFlow’s “whole-home” backup power box and Jackery’s new solar generator, but I’m sure it’s not a leap to say we should expect more gear like this in the coming years — as more people cope with climate anxiety and extreme weather events alike.

There was a ton of conservation-geared tech, too. Moen debuted a smart sprinkler with soil sensors and Rachio announced a $100 smart hose timer, both aiming to help lawn-havers save water and lower their bills.

For farmers, Meropy showed off its crop-watching robot, which rolls over fields on legs that look like giant hairbrush bristles. “The idea is to provide information to farmers to help them reduce the amount of chemicals they put on the plots,” co-founder and CEO William Guitton said in an interview with TechCrunch. Meropy’s bots weigh 15 kg (about 33 pounds) and pack cameras that “scan over and under the foliage,” Guitton said.

Along similar lines, John Deere showcased farming equipment that’s also supposed to reduce fertilizer use. Plus, Samsung announced washing machine tech that’s intended to save energy and halve microplastic pollution, while AMD highlighted energy efficiency gains in its new chips.

As for emissions mitigation, Schneider Electric made some waves with a smart-home system that’s centered around solar and energy storage. Schneider executive Jaser Faruq told TechCrunch he hopes the firm’s app will offer a “much more interesting, fulfilling experience for customers to feel like they’re in control of their power.” Ideally, the system will help users conserve energy and reduce their reliance on fossil fuel-powered grids, Faruq added. Some of the company’s energy-storage tech reminded me a lot of Tesla’s, which is no coincidence; Faruq previously worked in Tesla’s power storage and solar energy division.

No Traffic, a company that automates and surveils intersections, also caught my eye. When I asked if its name represented a goal or was just aspirational, co-founder and CEO Tal Kreisler told me it originally started as “kind of a joke,” because when people ask how long it takes to travel through perpetually busy areas — like from San Francisco to Palo Alto — you might sarcastically say, ‘with no traffic, it should take like 20 minutes.’”

Kreisler said the company’s goal is to smarten up intersections so municipalities can prioritize whatever they want — be it cars, buses, micromobility or pedestrians. That includes timing lights to reduce traffic, so ideally fewer cars are left idling on city streets, but really No Traffic’s scope is broader than its name implies.

If you count electric cars and e-bikes as mitigative climate tech (as I typically do), then read my editor Kirsten’s story on how electric-vehicle tech stole the show this year. The eye-catching announcements included Mercedes-Benz’s plan for a “global” EV charging network as well as the debut of Icoma’s bizarre suitcase motorcycle. I can’t speak to the need for transforming e-bikes with screens, but it’s nice to see automakers throw more weight behind EV charging infrastructure, which is burdened by unreliable chargers and environmental racism.

Unfortunately, Mercedes plans to focus on cities, so it probably won’t help quench rural America’s charging deserts.

And though they aren’t brand-new, I enjoyed the colorful shields on Swedish brand Cake’s Makka Prism e-bikes. Aren’t they kind of cute?

How companies at CES are taking on climate change (or pretending to) by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch