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Arcimoto, the maker of the three-wheeled electric Fun Utility Vehicles (FUVs), is teaming up with Faction to develop EVs that can be delivered to a customer’s hotel through a combination of low-level autonomy and tele-assist technology. The tie-up is part of an upcoming pilot in Las Vegas with GoCar Tours that will allow tourists to go sightseeing with Faction-powered FUVs.

Here’s how it’ll work: Arcimoto’s FUVs will be kitted out with Faction’s sensor suite of cameras and radar and its Level 2+ advanced driver assistance system, which handles tasks like lane assist and collision avoidance. The vehicles will also have a tablet that features GoCar’s GPS-guided tour of the Vegas strip (GoCar wants to eventually expand this tour to include Red Rock Canyon and the Hoover Dam). The vehicles will go from GoCar’s depot in the Arts District to various hotels along the strip — a straight, five-mile stretch of road with a 30 mile-per-hour speed limit. Tourists will then collect the FUVs and drive them along the tour route at their own pace before dropping themselves and the vehicles back at their hotels, whereupon the FUVs will “drive themselves” back to the GoCar depot.

I use quotations around “drive themselves” for a reason. Faction’s system can drive itself from A to B on a predetermined route and knows to stop itself if it encounters an anomaly or a task it’s not able to complete, like an object en route or an unprotected lefthand turn. But for judgement calls, it relies on the teleoperator. The teleoperator will remotely adjust the trajectory line that the vehicle is following to go around an object or into a parking lot and give the order to execute.

Arcimoto’s partnership with Faction and GoCar will originally involve about 20 vehicles starting in mid-2023, but the companies hope to expand the offering to an additional 290 vehicles across Vegas and other cities where GoCar operates, including San Francisco, San Diego and Barcelona.

Faction is a company that sees Level 5 autonomy as a research project that’s at least a decade out from actually commercializing, and teleoperation as a necessary component to scaling autonomous fleets today. The startup is building its business by focusing on doing “a right-sized tech stack with right-sized vehicles,” meaning Faction relies on a range of cameras, including a thermal camera, and radar to reach basic levels of autonomy, rather than fitting out a vehicle with expensive lidar and the latest compute systems.

“Right now our current vehicle systems are under $35,000,” Ain McKendrick, Faction’s CEO and founder, told TechCrunch. “We take about a $17,000 Arcimoto vehicle platform and we put on about $12,000 to $13,000 worth of tech. We’ve announced our partnership with Nvidia, but I don’t want their latest and greatest liquid-cooled Omniverse thing that’s going to take a trunk and a minivan to run. I want two generations back in their automotive-grade package that we can scale with.”

McKendrick said the benefit of being a “second wave autonomy company” is that Faction isn’t trying to solve for all of the edge cases just now. As it relates to its partnership with Arcimoto and GoCar, Faction is just trying to solve for replacing the human that would otherwise deliver those vehicles to customers’ hotels.

“Our goal is to be profitable at the $2 per mile price point out the gate, not to have the promise that it’ll be cost-reduced 10 years from now,” said McKendrick.

Aside from the gimmicky aspect of having a tour car drive itself to a customer’s hotel, GoCar is here for the potential cost-savings to its business.

“We’ve thought about the self-serve model where people can come and help themselves to a vehicle and drive off, and we used to have multiple locations, but the economies of having these multiple locations is challenging because you don’t know where the customer is going to be,” Nathan Withrington, GoCar founder, told TechCrunch. “We might have 10 cars available at one location and the other has a waitlist of 30 people. Then moving cars across town and everything is a nightmare.”

If customers can just summon a vehicle to them, where GoCar stores them becomes a lot less important. The company will get visibility from its cars just being on the road, and it’ll be easier to clean and prep them when they’re all accounted for.

GoCar has already been working with Arcimoto to offer FUVs to tourists. Withrington says FUVs are the first type of EV the company has put in its fleet that can actually handle the range it needs, can cross bridges and is highway legal. Plus, tourists love driving them.

For Arcimoto, the partnership is a chance to expand its reach as a tourist offering for vehicles, while also building on its current partnership with Faction. The two began working together last year to build the D1, a semi-autonomous delivery vehicle based on the FUV, and have been running pilots in the Bay Area since July, according to McKendrick.

Vegas visitors can take semi-autonomous EVs for a tour starting in 2023 by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

Security researchers say they have evidence that threat actors affiliated with the Cuba ransomware gang used malicious hardware drivers certified by Microsoft during a recent attempted ransomware attack.

Drivers — the software that allows operating systems and apps to access and communicate with hardware devices — require highly privileged access to the operating system and its data, which is why Windows requires drivers to bear an approved cryptographic signature before it will allow the driver to load.

These drivers have long been abused by cybercriminals, often taking a “bring your own vulnerable driver” approach, in which hackers exploit vulnerabilities found within an existing Windows driver from a legitimate software publisher. Researchers at Sophos say they have observed hackers making a concerted effort to progressively move toward using more widely trusted digital certificates.

While investigating suspicious activity on a customer network, Sophos discovered evidence that the Russia-linked Cuba ransomware gang are making efforts to move up the trust chain. During their investigation, Sophos found that the gang’s oldest malicious drivers dating back to July were signed by certificates from Chinese companies, then began signing their malicious driver with a leaked, since-revoked Nvidia certificate found in the data dumped by the Lapsus$ ransomware gang when it hacked the chipmaker in March.

The attackers have now managed to obtain “signage” from Microsoft’s official Windows Hardware Developer Program, which means the malware is inherently trusted by any Windows system.

“Threat actors are moving up the trust pyramid, attempting to use increasingly more well-trusted cryptographic keys to digitally sign their drivers,” wrote Sophos researchers Andreas Klopsch and Andrew Brandt in a blog post. “Signatures from a large, trustworthy software publisher make it more likely the driver will load into Windows without hindrance, improving the chances that Cuba ransomware attackers can terminate the security processes protecting their targets’ computers.”

Sophos found that the Cuba gang planted the malicious signed driver onto a targeted system using a variant of the so-called BurntCigar loader, a known piece of malware affiliated with the ransomware group that was first observed by Mandiant. The two are used in tandem in an attempt to disable endpoint detection security tools on the targeted machines.

If successful — which, in this case, they were not — the attackers could deploy the ransomware on the compromised systems.

Sophos, along with researchers from Mandiant and SentinelOne, informed Microsoft in October that drivers certified by legitimate certificates were used maliciously in post-exploitation activity. Microsoft’s own investigation revealed that several developer accounts for the Microsoft Partner Center were engaged in submitting malicious drivers to obtain a Microsoft signature.

“Ongoing Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center analysis indicates the signed malicious drivers were likely used to facilitate post-exploitation intrusion activity such as the deployment of ransomware,” Microsoft said in an advisory published as part of its monthly scheduled release of security patches, known as Patch Tuesday. Microsoft said it has released Windows security updates revoking the certificate for affected files and has suspended the partners’ seller accounts.

Earlier this month, a U.S. government advisory revealed that the Cuba ransomware gang has brought in an additional $60 million from attacks against 100 organizations globally. The advisory warned that the ransomware group, which has been active since 2019, continues to target U.S. entities in critical infrastructure, including financial services, government facilities, healthcare and public health, and critical manufacturing and information technology.

Ransomware gang caught using Microsoft-approved drivers to hack targets by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

A new report from GLAAD and Media Matters shows how anti-LGBTQ hate has increased on Twitter since Elon Musk acquired the company. This data coincides with controversial content moderation decisions Musk has taken as the head of Twitter, like disbanding its Trust and Safety Council and reinstating accounts like James Lindsay, Jordan Peterson and the Babylon Bee, which were previously banned for violating Twitter’s rules on hateful content.

The researchers looked at nine popular right-wing accounts to chart their use of the anti-LGBTQ slur “groomer.” Overall, these accounts saw a 1,200% uptick in tweets or retweets that used the slur, an increase of 3,600 instances to 48,000. In July, before Musk had taken ownership of the social media platform, the term “groomer” was considered a violation of Twitter’s hateful conduct policy when used in the context of discussion of gender identity.

In more traditional use, “groomer” refers to adults who seek to form connections with minors in order to sexually abuse them; but among certain right-wing influencers, the term is used as a slur to make unfounded, hateful accusations against LGBTQ people.

This rhetoric escalated as Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) passed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in March, which bans kindergarten through third grade teachers from teaching about gender identity or sexual orientation, as well as teachers in all grades from addressing topics that might not be “age-appropriate.” Critics have pointed out that the vague language of this bill could be interpreted very broadly, sparking concern and confusion among Florida school districts. As the law went into affect in July, some teachers said that their school districts barred them from wearing a rainbow flag pin or having a photo on their desk of their family if they were in a same-sex relationship. Now, House Republicans have introduced a bill similar to “Don’t Say Gay” on a national level, called the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.”

According to an August report from the Human Rights Campaign, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric about “grooming” increased by 400% on social media following the passage of “Don’t Say Gay.”

Image Credits: Media Matters (opens in a new window)

This online rhetoric has real-world impact, as anti-LGBTQ violence is on the rise in the U.S.

In the days after Musk’s Twitter acquisition, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO met with representatives from a number of civil rights groups to talk about the future of the platform. According tostatementsfrom leaders whoattended the meeting, Musk said he would not reinstate previously banned Twitter users until there is a transparent process for doing so. Musk also committed to including representatives from groups that suffer from hate-fueled violence in his proposed content moderation council.

But over a month later, Musk’s process for reinstating banned accounts remains as opaque as ever. He appears to be making content moderation decisions by running impromptu, day-long Twitter polls, which he used to justify reinstating former President Donald Trump’s account. Another poll inspired Musk to offer “amnesty” to suspended account holders, so long as they have not “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.”

This proposed content moderation council, which would include representatives from marginalized groups, has not yet materialized.

Musk himself has engaged in anti-LGBTQ dialogue on Twitter. Just this weekend, he tweeted, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” somehow managing to mock both trans people and one of the nation’s most well-known public health officials in just five words. Before Musk’s ownership, Twitter enforced a policy to mitigate the spread of misinformation about COVID-19, but as of November 23, Twitter is no longer enforcing that policy. Throughout 2020, he promoted vaccine skepticism and misinformation about COVID-19, while also targeting LGBTQ people with declarations like “pronouns suck.”

Former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly quote tweeted Musk’s “Prosecute/Fauci” tweet, writing, “Elon, please don’t mock and promote hate toward already marginalized and at-risk-of-violence members of the #LGBTQ+ community.”

Musk replied, “I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.”

Musk’s tweets have also inspired direct harm to Twitter’s former Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth. Roth, an openly gay Jewish man, stuck it out at Twitter for a few weeks after Musk’s takeover before ultimately stepping down.

As Musk works with former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss and former Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi to post a series of so-far-underwhelming exposes called “The Twitter Files,” he has gone digging into Roth’s academic research — his doctoral dissertation, “Gay Data,” examined the role of dating app Grindr in gay culture. Musk posted out-of-context snippets from the paper in an attempt to smear Roth with unfounded claims of supporting child sexualization, exemplifying the same anti-LGBTQ “groomer” rhetoric that has proliferated under his watch.

On Monday night, CNN reported that Roth was forced to flee his home due to increasing physical threats.

Anti-LGBTQ slur takes off on Twitter after Elon Musk’s takeover by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Honda is pulling away from a design practice that’s (literally) shaped auto making since the ’30s.

The $43 billion company still depends on life-size clay models to evaluate its designs, a tried and true method pioneered by GM designer Harley Earl. But Honda is gradually relying less on the practice, ever since the Coronavirus tore across the globe and resulting lockdowns divided its teams in Los Angeles, Ohio and Japan. The way Honda tells it, those early 2020 travel rules “threatened” its designers’ ability to work with engineers on the ’24 Prologue, creating a window for a deeper dive into virtual reality.

By July 2020, Honda had opened two studios dedicated to VR — one in Torrance, California and another in Tokyo — so its teams could provide feedback on iterations of interiors and exteriors, sans air travel. Around two and a half years later, the automaker said designs that it evaluated via VR are now rolling off assembly lines.

“You can mature a design in a much shorter time frame” in VR, the company said last week when it invited press into its SoCal site. Roughly half the size of an NBA court, the studio comfortably fit several reporters and more than a dozen Honda staffers, many in branded button-ups.

Around the space I saw dozens of Varjo headsets, monitors mounted on box trusses and three demo stations for peering into or “sitting” in virtual cars, like the ’23 Pilot and ’24 Prologue EV. One station was entirely virtual, and two others featured real-life steering wheels and gas pedals and doors, in a buck setup that looked to me like this Hyundai press image from 2019. Plenty of other automakers, including Ford and Bugatti, have also turned to VR to visualize their work.

Honda’s gear was fun to try out, and thankfully it didn’t leave me dizzy enough to delay my trek home. Rather than focus on my proclivity for motion sickness, I wanted to understand whether VR-aided design had any impact on the final results. How did it influence the Pilot? Can car-buyers expect anything new, now that some of Honda’s teams spend more time in virtual rooms?

Yet as far as I can tell, Honda hasn’t offered a precise explanation of what, if anything, is different about cars refined in VR. Instead, the automaker talked up efficiency. In a statement, it said “one of the many tests performed included color evaluation in a VR environment, which is valuable for the color, materials, and finishes team to visualize all trims holistically, enabling instant feedback between the design studios in LA and Japan.” Uh, nice!

During Honda’s demos, staffers explained how VR saved them time on model development, letting them rapidly change designs so they could be reviewed later that same day. At least for now, it seems the impact of VR on the design of Honda cars will be invisible to shoppers. Virtual or not, Hondas will be Hondas.

Honda also did not share exactly how many clay models it develops before mass producing a car or SUV. During the event, one staffer told TechCrunch that the firm has “a few touch points” where it checks designs via physical models, “and we’re removing them one by one,” he explained.

The same staffer added that over time the firm is “building up the trust, and decision-makers being able to say, ‘yes, it’s good’” without checking a physical model. I wish I could remember who said this, but when you’ve had a headset strapped to your face (pictured above), it’s hard to keep track of who’s saying what.

As I struggled to balance the virtual and physical worlds, Honda made its case that VR was actually making things speedier and easier. Yet, the automaker wouldn’t say if it would pass the time saved by its designers on to shoppers in the form of lower prices. Honda was also quick to emphasize that it would not “pursue a purely digital approach,” as Bugatti said it has done. Honda’s VR head Mathieu Geslin credited physical models for ensuring it didn’t “lose emotion and the human touch” of its cars.

Honda designers apparently prefer a hybrid approach. After I stripped off a headset and returned to the room, I asked if anyone at the company struggled to adapt to VR. A staffer told me some designers, especially in interiors, “love touching things. They like feeling things, so it’s a bit of a departure for them,” they explained, adding that virtual evaluations are “hard to accept sometimes.”

It’s possible that Honda’s shift toward VR is also making its design team more sustainable, by eliminating some executive air travel as well as iterations of models that would ultimately wind up in a landfill. Still, VR is unlikely to seriously move the needle, emissions-wise, given the enormity of mass production and the staying power of combustion engines. Fully electrifying cars would go way further in reducing emissions, but Honda’s deadline for doing so is still years away.

Honda says VR is changing how it designs cars. You might not notice. by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch

Slowly but surely, state by state, the U.S. is becoming more cannabis-friendly. As the number of states where weed is legalized (or at least decriminalized) grows, so too does the number of companies building amazing products for cannabis users.

Got a friend who partokes and lives somewhere cool about it? Why not upgrade their experience with some fancy cannabis-focused tech this holiday season? The following gifts represent a range of products from startups, makers, and housegood companies attempting to break into the massive market.

There’s something here for everyone — from consumption devices to storage containers to coffee table items. None of these fit the bill? Give a pre-roll. Everyone loves a good pre-roll.

This article contains links to affiliate partners where available. When you buy through these links, TechCrunch may earn an affiliate commission.

DynaVap

DynaVaps are my go-to. They’re pocketable and produce a great cloud of vapor. Think of it as a one-hitter vape with a thermometer. First heat the tip with a torch or induction heater; the cap will click in about 3 to 5 seconds, notifying the user that the herb is at the right temperature and ready to hit. The cannabis lasts about three to four cycles. Since the cap protects the ground flower from the flame, there’s no combustion or smoke — just vapor — and very little smell.

DynaVap vaporizers are CNC machined in the company’s DeForest, Wisconsin, facility. George Breiwa started the company in 2015 and currently employs around 40 people. The company sells several versions of the little metal vape, starting with the $50 “B” and ending with the $220 titanium Omni.

Word of warning: I’ve given a lot of DynaVaps to friends, and I’ve found people either love it or hate it. It takes a bit of practice to get a good cloud.

Puffco Proxy

Puffco has long led the market with innovative cannabis vaporizers. The Puffco Peak Pro is easily one of the best e-rigs available, and the company just unveiled a new vape called the Proxy. It offers the best of the Peak Pro and can be built into various form factors.

Don’t be distracted by the lovely pipe. That’s just a piece of glass. The Proxy slides into the glass piece. Think of the Proxy as a modular dabbing rig, able to fit into any form factor made for the unit. Bubbler? Sure. Glass beaker? Yep. Pipe? Obviously.

The $299 self-contained rig is about the size of a taller D-cell battery. Inside is the same heating element found in the company’s other flagship product, the Peak Pro. The battery can be recharged over USB-C, and the unit comes preprogrammed with four different heat levels.

Hitoki Saber

Get this: The Hitoki Saber uses a high-powered laser to light a bowl. It’s not cheap, but it’s a great (and fun) alternative to butane lighters. Just hit the button, and a laser shoots into a packed bowl. Best of all, with the right adapter it works with any glass piece. Also best of all,lasers.

The Saber is the second device from Hitoki, which debuted its laser system with the all-in-one Trident rig. The Trident is much larger than the Saber but features an integrated water chamber and mouthpiece.

Lighting your pot with lasers isn’t a cheap solution. Both of the Hitoki products carry hefty prices: The Saber costs $359, and the Trident is $499.(opens in a new window)

KushKards

KushKards are great. As I said above, if you don’t have anything else for the stoner in your life, give them a pre-roll. If you want that pre-roll to look extra special, tuck it in a KushKard.

Each of these clever greeting cards has a special spot meant to hold a pre-roll and is designed around cute one-liners like “joint to the world” or “light up the holidays.”

The cards start at $7 and include the option to bundle a holiday-themed one-hitter.

Houseplant Car Lighter

Seth Rogen’s weed brand makes and sells terrific cannabis products. The best one? It’s the Car Lighter. It’s a fun repurposing of the classic, pop-out car lighter we all burned our thumbs on as kids, now housed in a hefty block that’s perfect for a coffee table. Just push the lighter down — a few seconds later, it will pop up ready to light your next joint.

The Car Lighter is made out of marble and is available in two colors: green and gray. At $280, it’s a bit of a statement piece.

Green: A Field Guide to Marijuana

Green: A Field Guide to Marijuana is a lovely coffee table book filled with beautiful pictures of classic strains. It’s marketed as a go-to guide, but for me, it’s a wonderful book to flip through during a chill smoking session. You’ll learn about the lineage, flavor, and effects produced by 170 marijuana strains. And the photography is exceptional!

For the aspiring weed grower in your life, opt for this book instead. Written by Ed Rosenthal (he’s a big deal), the Marijuana Grower’s Handbook is an all-in-one source for turning a seed into a bountiful harvest.

Storz & Bickel Mighty+

This is the best vaporizer available. It’s reliable, can cook a lot of herb, and produces some of the best vapor from any device. Sure, there are drawbacks — including its large size and $399 price — but it’s worth it.

Storz & Bickel released the original in 2014 and released an updated version in October 2021. The new Mighty+ features quicker heat-up time, USB-C recharging and a ceramic filling chamber that’s much easier to keep clean than the chamber in the original.

A quick tip: The Mighty+ features orange arrow buttons, while the original’s are gray. You want the new one.

Markus Storz started working on a herbal vaporizer in 1996, and in 2002 Jürgen Bickel joined the board, forming Storz & Bickel. The company still sells its original, groundbreaking device, the Volcano, and several less expensive products. The company is based in Germany, where its vaporizers carry medical device certifications. In 2018, Canadian cannabis giant Canopy Growth acquired Storz & Bickel. Jürgen Bickel remains at the company and runs the day-to-day operations.

Want something smaller? The Crafty+ is cheaper and smaller but still packs much of the same power as the Mighty+.

Storage Containers

It’s 2022. Don’t store your bud in a plastic baggie. A proper container will better preserve your green, and you’ve got countless options.

The Libbey BudShield isn’t subtle but features a handsome exterior and an-all glass construction: $35 for 3.

The Staze features a unique design with a smell-proof design and a built-in airtight vacuum sealer: $18.

The Higher Standards Mason Jar is, well, an upgraded mason jar. The 8 oz jar is child-resistant, made in America, and features a Higher Standards-branded koozie made from 100% silicone that wraps the jar: $30.

Jonathan Adler sells trendy house goods; in 2022 few products are more trendy than weed. The houseware company has a line of storage containers that are clearly designed to be displayed, including this lovely porcelain canister with a giant, hand-painted Weed label: $30.

Need to hide your stash? There are countless diversion storage containers on Amazon and Etsy. This Barbasol version is my favorite: $18.99.

(opens in a new window)

(Fake) Pot Plant

Give a Pot Plant this holiday. But not a real one. These are fake plants designed to be displayed. They come in a variety of sizes and faux strains. The Clone (smallest option) stands 10 inches tall and costs $30. It’s subtle because, like an actual clone, the plastic plant is feigning to be in a state that doesn’t feature any buds yet.

The Teen plant is 16 inches tall and features a couple of small buds. The Adult is 22 inches with a few faux-growing buds on its main cola. The $165, 36-inch tall Mother Pot Plant is a monster fake plant with frosty buds growing throughout the plant.

9 high-tech gift ideas for the cannabis users in your life by Matt Burns originally published on TechCrunch

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Why, hello there, Crunchianistas!

Today, Haje is waltzing around the house, candle in hand, celebrating Saint Lucia. Honestly, not because he’s that excited about the traditional Scandinavian celebration or the excitement about candlelight and saffron buns, but because he’s visiting his parents and there’s a power cut. Which means all manner of excitement in the cold, frozen European, –7°C December. Christine, meanwhile, is chillin’ like a villain in 80-degree heat. Luckily, that’s in Fahrenheit, or we’d be looking at pretty severe discomfort.

Okay, that’s enough about the weather outside. Let’s take a look at which way the wind is blowing elsewhere, such as in the world of tech. — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

Trading suits for stripes: After much fodder all over the place of why Sam Bankman-Fried was not behind bars sooner for his involvement in the collapse of FTX, Darrell reports that SBF was arrested in the Bahamas amid fraud charges brought by several U.S. government entities. We’re sure this is just the beginning.
Don’t let them get away: If it’s not easy, customers are going to move on. That’s why TheyDo wants companies to own their customers’ journeys and helps large companies get organized with the customer in mind, Mike reports.
Blue and gray and gold, oh my!: You’ve probably noticed that Twitter has gotten more colorful lately. That’s on purpose. We can’t keep up with it either, so thankfully we have Ivan to break down what all those check marks and badges mean. More check mark news in the Big Tech section.

Startups and VC

After being bootstrapped for seven years, Ngrok today announced that it raised $50 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Coatue. Shreve tells Kyle that with the fresh capital, Ngrok will grow operations and “make continued investments” to improve its core product offering.

The trillion-dollar construction industry isn’t known for its efficiency, accused of failing to move with the times and ignoring digitization in favor of legacy tools, Paul reports. There is plenty of evidence that things are changing, with countless startups raising large sums of cash to help the construction industry modernize. It’s against that backdrop that German VC firm Foundamental today unveiled its new fund, targeting $85 million at early-stage construction tech startups globally and building on the early success it has seen from its inaugural $65 million fund, which closed back in 2019.

And we have five more for you:

Push button for preloved: Beni is creating an “easy button” for secondhand shopping, writes Christine.
There’s no accounting for AI: Kyle reports that Vic.ai raises $52 million, showing that automating accounting processes can be profitable.
Swooping in with your medicines: Swoop Aero’s drones hit a million items delivered as the company raises for expansion, reports Devin.
It’s part car, part party, part website: Rebecca reports that an ex–Rocket Lab engineer raised $21 million for Partly to make buying car parts easier.
This drink makes you feel things: Poppi raises a can to fresh capital to support its functional beverage growth, Christine reports.

3 methods for valuing pre-revenue novel AI startups

The Berkus method, scorecard valuation and venture capital are the most-commonly used frameworks for costing pre-revenue startups, but when it comes to AI, are traditional yardsticks still useful?

“AI can scale much faster than other technologies, so what works at the beta or minimum viable product stage may not work when an AI product scales to millions of users,” says Ryan E. Long, principal attorney of Long & Associates.

Long identifies some of the limitations of using traditional means to value premoney “prototype or novel AI startups” in an article that identifies regulatory issues and shares tactics designed to “minimize the number of uncertain variables.”

Now three more from the TC+ team:

Here to dispel the con-fusion: Tim breaks down why it’s exciting that the world-record fusion experiment produced even more energy than expected.
Meet ouroboros: Becca writes that we’re going to see more startups acquire other startups.
With 1.3 billion of investments and 1,000 portfolio companies: Gener8tor is the biggest startup accelerator you’ve never heard of, by Haje.

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.

Apple’s iOS 16.2 update is now available for all users, along with iPadOS 16.2 and macOS Ventura 13.1, Ivan writes. He has a look at all of the top features of the update, including improved encryption for iCloud data, Live Activities on the home screen, a karaoke feature for Apple Music and the new collaborative whiteboard app Freeform.

Speaking of Apple, Zack spent some time tracking down information from the consumer tech giant, writing that it confirmed “that an iPhone software update it released two weeks ago fixed a zero-day security vulnerability that it now says was actively exploited.”

And we have five more for you:

Bye bye, check mark: Christine just got the coveted blue Twitter check last year after trying for 10 years, and now it’s going away. Rebecca writes that Twitter will remove all legacy verifications “in a few months.” Christine took a photo of her profile for posterity, just to show she was at one time notable.
Bye bye, virtual reality world: “Westworld” fans need to set up a binge watch party soon because the show, along with others, may soon be removed from HBO Max, writes Lauren.
Hello, new valuation: It’s hard to know what private companies are worth, so it can be a treat when one company tells us. And while a big valuation was the goal for 2021, companies were being more realistic in 2022. In this case, Romain writes about why Checkout‏‎.com lowered its internal valuation.
Hello to compensation: Uber’s food delivery business settled with over 4,000 dismissed couriers in Spain and agreed to pay severance to those let go ahead of the country’s labor reform law, Natasha L reports.
Bye bye and hello: Paul writes that Microsoft will sunset the Soundscape 3D audio app, but it will release the code in an open source format for developers.

Daily Crunch: US law enforcement charges SBF with fraud as he awaits extradition after Bahamas arrest by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey issued a warning on the social network’s state and prospects, saying it meets none of the standards he hoped to achieve and that harassment of its staff is shortsighted and dangerous. It’s time to move on, as he’s said before, and to that end he’s funding new efforts in “open internet development,” starting with $1 million per year to Signal.

Starting in a Twitter thread but quickly transitioning to a blog post (“I don’t want to edit everything into 280 char chunks,” he wrote — shade he probably never anticipated throwing), Dorsey said that his hope to build a Twitter according to his wishes died in 2020 with the entrance of an unnamed activist investor.

“I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company,” he wrote.

The principles he had hoped to build on — resilience to corporate and government control, user-controlled content with no exceptions and algorithmic moderation — are not present in today’s Twitter, nor in the one he led, he admitted.

Even so, he wrote that, contrary to the insinuations accompanying the so-called Twitter Files, “there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time.”

The various threads have been very selective in what they show and what they redact, while casting certain staff, particularly former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, as being power-mad and agenda-driven. Roth reportedly experienced harassment in person serious enough that he had to temporarily leave his home. On the whole there is little new in what has been published beyond a handful of convenient scapegoats for imagined abuse.

Of this Dorsey says:

As for the files, I wish they were released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider. And along with that, commitments of transparency for present and future actions. I’m hopeful all of this will happen. There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from. The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything. If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.

Be careful what you wish for, Jack.

The conversations themselves, as I wrote last week, do in fact constitute a very interesting look at the difficulty of moderation under unprecedented circumstances. The frank and open discussion of how to interpret a rule or what action they should or shouldn’t take is exactly what one would hope is happening behind the scenes of such a process. Imputations of bias have little or no documentary weight behind them, beyond whatever is lent by a carefully curated presentation openly intended to promote that narrative.

As to actual solutions, Dorsey is of course hard at work (or at least present) at Bluesky, but he calls out Mastodon and Matrix as other worthwhile avenues for development:

There will be many more. One will have a chance at becoming a standard like HTTP or SMTP. This isn’t about a “decentralized Twitter.” This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet.

Putting his money where his mouth is, he announced that he’ll start by funding Signal (definitely resilient to governments) to the tune of $1 million/year. More grants are forthcoming, he said, and solicited recommendations. And fortunately, since what appeared to be his personal email was inadvertently published by Matt Taibbi in the first Twitter Files thread, everyone should be able to get in touch.

Jack Dorsey warns against attacks on Twitter staff and dedicates $1M a year to Signal by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch

Defense technology continues to get a lot of attention from investors, and today, one of the bigger startups in the space is announcing more funding. Shield AI — which develops platforms and planes for autonomous flying systems, targeting the U.S. military and its allies as customers — has raised $60 million in funding, money that it will be using to continue developing its technology.

The money is coming in as an additional part of Shield AI’s Series E, and it brings the total round to $225 million. Shield AI announced the previous $165 million tranche in June, which gave the startup a valuation of $2.3 billion. We’ve confirmed with Brandon Tseng, Shield AI’s president, who co-founded the company with his brother, CEO Ryan Tseng, that this extension came in at the same valuation.

This latest $60 million came from a single investor, Hollywood producer Thomas Tull. (Previous investors in the company include Snowpoint Ventures, Riot Ventures, Disruptive, Homebrew, Point72 Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Breyer Capital and SVB Capital.) Interestingly, the company actually closed this extra funding a week after the last round was announced.

We’re in a tricky period for fundraising: investors have tightened their purse strings in reaction to tech companies, from the top down, seeing a slowdown in business. Then startups finding it harder to raise money have had to cut costs to extend their runways and demonstrate to their backers that they have business ideas that will grow and be profitable. And even if they do all that, they might still run out of money and have to shut down.

Amidst all that, defense tech has been one of the categories that has stood out, not least because of world events: tensions between nations, terrorism and wars are all being played out on a technological level these days, and that means not only equipping those in combat with better tools, but also potentially using technology to carry out any action in order to reduce casualties.

“Military and government spending is countercyclical,” said Tseng in an interview. “When you talk to a consumer or enterprise business, spending goes down in a recession. But the government is a Steady Eddie. Modernizing the military requires a path and a plan and so it will continue to execute on that.”

All of that is what’s driving business for the best startups in the space, and that in turn is getting investors interested, too.

“Automated defense capabilities will play an increasingly essential role in our defense programs and are critical to our ability to remain competitive,” said Tull in a statement. “Shield AI is a leader in this space, developing some of the most advanced and cutting-edge technology for AI piloting. We are proud to be able to support Shield AI and the work they are doing in defense.”

Shield AI is based out of San Diego, which we previously described as the Silicon Valley of the defense industry: it’s the home port of the U.S. Pacific fleet, and according to stats gathered by the city’s chamber of commerce, outside of Fairfax County, Virginia (where the Pentagon is based), greater San Diego gets more defense spending than any other place in the U.S. Shield is based there, among dozens of other major and smaller defense contractors.

The company already has a number of aircraft as well as its Hivemind autonomous flying software on the market and deployed with customers (e.g., in the F16 plane pictured above) — Shield AI is part of the U.S. Department of Defense Program of Record — and it’s working on a number of other projects, including VTOL autonomous plane software and hardware, and “swarming” capabilities to jam signals or to help their customers communicate when their signals are being jammed.

Indeed, the large size of Shield AI’s round, $225 million, is a sign not just of that demand, but also of the high costs associated with developing for this industry. It comes just 11 days after Anduril, another defense tech startup working on autonomous systems, confirmed that it had raised close to $1.5 billion at a $7 billion valuation.

Shield AI raises another $60M at a $2.3B valuation for its military autonomous flying tech by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

About 29% of Indonesia’s workforce is in the agriculture sector, but many small farmers face challenges like low access to working capital. Eratani is an end-to-end management system that helps them get financing and supplies, and then helps them sell crops once they are ready. The startup announced today it has raised an oversubscribed $3.8 million seed round led by Singaporean VC firm TNB Aura, with participation from AgFunder, Trihill Capital and B.I.G. Ventures.

Founded in 2021 by Andrew Soeherman, Kevin Laksono and Angles Gani, Eratani is now used by more than 10,000 farmers in Java to manage a total of 8,000 hectares producing 52,000 tons of rice. Its target is to work with more than 50,000 farmers by the end of 2024.

Soeherman’s uncle ran an agricultural supplies business, which gave him a look into the difficulties faced by farmers while he was growing up. He told TechCrunch that most agritech players address farmers’ downstream needs, so Eratani was originally developed to deal with upstream issues, before turning into an end-to-end management platform for farms and goods through the entire production cycle.

Some of the challenges Indonesian farmers face include needing to borrow money in order to purchase agri-input supplies from stores. They pay off those loans after they sell their crops, but interest is about 20% a month, said Soeherman, which means they are caught in a cycle of debt. “In Indonesia, there are 33 million farmers and the majority are aged over 45 years. If nothing changes, within 10 years Indonesia will experience a farmer regeneration crisis.”

Eratani’s management platform is divided into three parts. The first, Agri Financing, gives farmers access to working capital they need for the planting process. Agri Inputs provides agricultural supplies with usage recommendations from its agronomist teams. Finally, Agri Output is a market price system for use during the crop distribution process.

Eratani also collects field data statistics to increase farmers’ productivity. Through the platform, farmers have access to Eratani’s agronomists who can help them with strategies to increase their crop yield.

The startup currently has several collaborations in place with the Indonesian government. This includes a partnership with the Agricultural Ministry of Indonesia and the Indonesian State Logistics Agency to develop the agricultural ecosystem, with the goal of achieving food independence in Indonesia, and another one with the Agricultural Ministry of Indonesia to increase crop yields and farmer income. It is also part of the Ministry of Communications and Informatics’ Startup Studio Indonesia.

Agritech startups are proliferating in Indonesia and some that have been covered by TechCrunch include B2B marketplace AgriAku, agritech platform TaniHub and “sea-to-table” startup Aruna.

Soeherman said Eratani differentiates by creating an ecosystem for the entire agricultural process, but he doesn’t see other players as competition. “In the agritech industry, we believe that the entire community should come together to support and encourage the Indonesian agricultural industry. Despite having over 70+ agritech companies operating within the space, there is still a long way to go as it is estimated only 3% of Indonesia’s farmers have benefitted from these technologies overall.”

In a statement, TNB founding partner Vicknesh R. Pillay said, “The agritech space in Indonesia has reached an inflection point due to its presently fragmented nature. Eratani has brought to the table a farmer-centric approach along with a strong team and existing partnerships in the space, and we are excited to begin this journey with Eratani.”

Eratani supports Indonesia’s farmers through the entire growing process by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups.

This week, Cheryl Sew Hoy, the founder of Tiny Health, tells Darrell and Becca about the complex science behind baby gut microbiomes. Sew Hoy talks about why she got interested in the subject, what it was like researching the field and how she turned her findings into Tiny Health’s suite of gut microbiome testing kits. She also talked about why this knowledge is so important and how a baby’s gut microbiome will impact their health for the rest of their life.

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Trusting your gut microbiome with Cheryl Sew Hoy from Tiny Health by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch