WP Pro Online

We’re over the moon to announce the three early-stage startups that will take the stage and go head-to-head in the pitch competition at TC Sessions: Space — next Tuesday, December 6, in Los Angeles. There’s still time to join this mission.

Buy your pass right now to watch these early-stage space aces square off in front of a live audience.

The contenders will have to be at their very best to impress this group of expert space-focused VCs — Jory Bell, general partner at Playground Global; Mark Boggett, co-founder and CEO of Seraphim Space; Tess Hatch, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners; and Emily Henriksson, principal at Root Ventures.

What’s at stake? The competitors will all receive invaluable exposure to investors and plenty of media attention. But only one will rise above the rest to win the glory — and earn an automatic place in the Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2023.

Not familiar with the SB 200? It’s a juried cohort of 200 early-stage startups selected by TechCrunch. Each SB 200 company receives a VIP experience that includes, for starters, exhibiting on all three days of the show — for free — plus a shot at winning $100,000.

Okay, let’s get to it. Here are the three early-stage space startups that we chose to compete in the TC Sessions: Space Pitch-off.

Arch Rift: This startup builds oxygen helmets that deploy automatically. They’re designed for use in space tourism and future space settlements and — according to the website — to help “make space safe and accessible to all.”

Plasmos: This startup is developing a reusable, affordable space tug designed to deliver up to four small satellites to anywhere in lower Earth orbit.

Fluix: Increases thermal performance in data storage and processing by utilizing an all-in-one modular liquid cooler.

Be in the room to watch these founders in action, learn more about their cutting-edge technology and see who wins the day.

TC Sessions: Space takes place on December 6 in Los Angeles. Buy your pass today, and then join us to see and learn about the latest space tech and trends, meet rising-star founders and network for opportunities to build a stronger startup.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Space? Contact our sponsorship sales team byfilling out this form.

Meet the startups competing at TC Sessions: Space by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch

BrightDrop, General Motors’ electric delivery van subsidiary, added DHL Express Canada to its portfolio of customers, marking the company’s entrance into its first international market.

BrightDrop has also started production on its Zevo 600 delivery vans (formerly called EV600) at GM’s CAMI Assembly plant in Ontario, the company said Monday at the plant’s grand opening. The facility is expected to produce 50,000 Zevo vans annually by 2025, with scaled production of the Zevo 600 and the Zevo 400 (formerly EV410) scheduled for January 2023 and “late 2023,” respectively.

Over 25,000 Zevo 600s have been reserved by customers like DHL that are eager to reach net-zero goals — DHL has put aside €7 billion to get there by 2050. So far, BrightDrop has delivered 150 vehicles to FedEx, its U.S. launch customer. Those vans were built at a Michigan facility by German contracted supplier Kuka AG in order to meet customer demand in advance of the CAMI plant’s opening.

“Bringing BrightDrop to Canada and starting production at CAMI is a major step to providing EVs at scale, while delivering real results to the world’s biggest brands,” said Travis Katz, BrightDrop president and CEO, in a statement. “Our international expansion is proof that we can deliver exactly what our customers need where they need it. Having DHL Express Canada come onboard as a new customer shows the confidence legacy brands have in our ability to deliver.”

DHL Express Canada will add its first BrightDrop Zevo vans to its fleet early next year, said BrightDrop. The GM subsidiary didn’t provide TechCrunch with a more firm timeline nor how many delivery vans DHL reserved. A spokesperson from the company told TechCrunch that BrightDrop sees an opportunity to contribute substantially to DHL’s fleet, 60% of which will be electric by 2030.

To accompany the vans, DHL will pilot BrightDrop’s Trace eCarts — smart, electrically propelled carts that are designed to help logistics companies efficiently transport multiple packages from van to recipient — and subscription-based software platform in Toronto, with more regions to follow. BrightDrop Core, the software platform, was unveiled last month at GM’s investor day as a way to provide customers with more detailed insights into their operations.

The launch of the Ontario plant follows BrightDrop’s projections that it is on track to reach $1 billion in revenue next year — an impressive feat, if true, considering the company is so young. BrightDrop only launched last year, but GM gave it a kick-start in the form of an $800 million investment to convert the CAMI plant into a high-volume EV production facility.

BrightDrop would not share specifics on the price to reserve or buy its vehicles.

BrightDrop expands e-delivery van business to Canada with DHL Express by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

Google’s latest “feature drop” for Pixel phones and the Pixel Watch brings features like a call quality enhancement function called “Clear Calling,” free access to Google One’s VPN service, a new privacy and security settings hub, and Fitbit sleep profiles for the Pixel Watch.

Here’s the summary of all the features included in this announcement.

Exclusive Pixel 7 and 7 Pro features

During the Pixel 7 series launch, Google said that folks buying the new devices would get access to a VPN included in Google One subscriptions at no cost. With the latest update, that feature will become available to the Pixel 7 and the Pixel 7 Pro owners.
If you are a user of the company’s latest flagship phone, Google is also introducing its clear calling feature. It will reduce background noise and enhance your voice so the person on the other side of the call can hear you better.

The latest update brings speaker labels to the Recorder app that will automatically assign labels to multiple people in the recording. What’s more, the app will introduce a line break whenever the speaker changes in transcriptions. Journalists and interviewers will be pretty happy with this feature. Professional transcription tools like Otter.ai offers this service, but it’s a good feature to have on your phone. Hopefully, Google introduces this feature to other Pixel devices too.

Features for all Pixel phones

Google is introducing a new hub so that you can easily access your privacy and security settings. It includes shortcuts to the app security feature, screen lock settings, Find My Device and Google Security Checkup. The hub will show you action cards if any of your accounts are at risk and suggest steps to bolster security for them.

The update has a bunch of new wallpapers to celebrate the International Day of People with Disabilities.
Pixel devices are finally getting a Spatial Audio update if you pair your phone with the Pixel Buds Pro. Google says this pairing enables head tracking for an immersive experience. But you’ll have to wait until January to get it.

Pixel Watch updates

Pixel Watch owners are getting a Fitbit Premium feature even if they are not Fitbit Premium subscribers: Sleep Profiles. This function tracks 10 different things like sleep duration, disruptions and bedtime consistency to analyze your sleep. It also assigns you a cute animal based on your sleep patterns if you wore the Pixel Watch for 14 nights in November.

Google’s new Watch is also getting Tiles for weather and favorite contacts — Tiles are widget-like screens that give you information at a glance. These Tiles were also a part of the company’s December feature release for Android.
The search giant has also promised that the Pixel Watch will get a fall detection feature next year. Once triggered, the watch will contact emergency services if it detects that you are unresponsive. Notably, the Apple Watch has had this feature since the Series 4 model.

These features will roll out to the Pixel watch and Pixel phones (for Pixel 4a and above) through over-the-air updates starting today.

Google’s new Pixel update brings new features like clear calling and Google One VPN by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

A company may have a good contact center, but ideally they are able to help customers before they need to make a call. Operative Intelligence helps contact centers figure out what customers want more quickly, improving automated inquiries and cutting down on wait times. The Melbourne and Los Angeles-based startup announced today it has raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by Bonfire Ventures with participation from Wonder Ventures.

Operative Intelligence was founded in 2019 by brothers Peter and James Ianesk, who have spent 25 years working in customer service and contact centers.

More than 10 years ago, James developed a methodology to find out why customers were calling a large Australian health insurer. At that time, contact center systems didn’t have that information, so James came up with a manual system to analyze thousands of Post-It notes transcribed by contact center representatives from customer calls. Those notes were analyzed by a team using the “5 Whys” system for finding the root cause of a problem. As a result, James was able to help that contact center increase its net promoter score 5x.

The brothers continued to work on their method with high-growth tech companies and three years ago, started looking for a way to turn it into a software system.

“What we found 10 years on was that all the contact centers we had worked in continued to experience the same problems and there still wasn’t a solution in the market that surfaced the type of insight that contact centers and businesses need to better meet the needs of their customers at scale,” Peter, Operative Intelligence’s CEO, told TechCrunch.

Operative Intelligence gives contact centers data about why their customers are contacting them without the need to spend time shifting through different sources of data. The fully automated platform analyzes customer inquiries through several channels, including phone calls, emails, chat, web requests, social media, online reviews and customer warranty requests. Then it delivers reports on the root causes of why customers are contacting businesses.

Its platform also breaks down customer inquiries into prioritized lists. One details customer pain points and what they cost the business each year in service costs. Another one is of inquiries that can be completed through self service and its potential ROI. Operative Intelligence also produces reports on contact center performance by site, team and inquiries, and agent effectiveness by inquiry type.

One of Operative Intelligence’s customers used its data to prioritize fixing customer issues over deploying new features, which James said resulted in a 32% reduction in their call volume and a seven-figure reduction in service cost. Another moved more than half of their call volume into digital channels and reduced the time spent on phone calls by 23%, using best practices identified by Operative Intelligence.

The startup’s main competitors include NICE Nexidia, CallMiner and Call Journey. James said Operative Intelligence differentiates as the only platform that can automatically identify the root cause of a customer inquiry, requiring no model training or business tagging of data and having an ROI built into its insights. It can be deployed by a business in two weeks.

In a statement about Bonfire Ventures’ investment, managing director Mark Mullen said, “James and Peter have built an intuitive solution to improve the customer experience at a time when needs are heightened. We look forward to their next moves to utilize AI technology to reshape an untapped space.”

Operative Intelligence helps contact centers figure out what customers really need by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

As inflation and general economic uncertainties spur C-suites to identify cost-cutting areas within their organizations, software-as-a-service (SaaS) spend is becoming a prime target.

SaaS is obviously a broad category, covering any centrally hosted software that’s licensed on a subscription basis. But no matter the flavor, SaaS is a growing line item in companies’ budgets — a line item that’s threatening profitability.

According to a recent report from SaaS purchasing management platform Vertice, SaaS pricing inflation is growing four times faster than global inflation. Moreover, customers are putting 53% more toward licensing than they were five years ago, the survey found, with $1 in every $8 that enterprises spend today going into SaaS products.

That might sound like an enormous pile of recurring cash. But it’s not surprising when you consider the average organization now uses around 110 SaaS solutions, according to BetterCloud, with large companies using an estimated 447.

Management has come down aggressively: Fifty-seven percent of IT teams told Workato in a 2022 poll that they’re under pressure to reduce SaaS spend — a task that’s easier said than done in organizations where teams and even entire divisions rely on SaaS suites to get their work done.

To get a sense of the SaaS landscape in a time of cutbacks and cost reductions, we spoke to analysts at Gartner and PwC who study trends in the software procurement market.

How companies can slash ballooning SaaS costs by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Not quite a decade ago, two technologies were racing toward an unseen finish line. They weren’t competing with each other — the adoption of one didn’t lock out the other. But to avoid catastrophic climate consequences, the order of the finish mattered.

Autonomous vehicles had to lose, and electric vehicles had to win.

It wasn’t clear at the time which one would take the checkered flag. In some ways, autonomous vehicles seemed to have momentum on their side, making considerable progress since the first ones cautiously completed the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2007. Ten years later, seemingly everyone had a self-driving division.

Meanwhile, electric vehicles were off to a slow start. Early models could go less than 100 miles per charge on batteries that cost about a third of the cost of the entire car. Tesla broke the mold in 2012 with the Model S, but it was priced outside the bulk of the U.S. auto market. By 2017, the picture hadn’t changed much.

What a difference five years makes.

Autonomous vehicles have largely stalled while EVs have surged ahead. Self-driving vehicles may have conquered many mundane driving scenarios, but they’re still frequently stymied by other situations that human drivers navigate on a daily basis — pedestrians, inclement weather, construction zones.

Yes, Waymo and Cruise are operating taxi services that are open to the public, but they’re only available in parts of Tempe and San Francisco, respectively, cities they’ve been mapping and testing in for years. As anyone who’s driven in a different city knows, each metro area has its own quirks. Making the leap to a new city won’t be easy. Even former boosters like Lyft co-founder and president John Zimmer, who just six years ago said the majority of rides on the network would be autonomous today, now expects just 1% to 10% of future rides would fit that bill.

EVs, on the other hand, have been ascendant. Battery prices have fallen from over $1,000 per kilowatt-hour in the early 2010s to just over $100. Investors are pouring money into battery startups, and battery manufacturers are racing to build a global network of factories.

While affordable EVs remain rare, prices have come down since the Model S was introduced, and the number of models has expanded dramatically. Sales in Europe, China, and the U.S. have swelled, and the future is looking even rosier in the wake of legislative and regulatory action that is cementing batteries as the go-to energy source for cars and light trucks.

Those two trends are diverging not a moment too late.

Autonomous driving’s blunders are good news for the climate by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

Circle Internet Financial (Circle), the company behind the popular USDC stablecoin, called off its merger with a blank check company this morning, ending its SPAC-led run toward going public. Circle’s SPAC deal made news when announced last year and earlier this year when it was repriced.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Last we heard, Circle had renegotiated its SPAC transaction, boosting its enterprise value from $4.5 billion to $9 billion. What happened between then and now to get us from a new, higher deal price to a termination?

We’re following that particular arc today. Our investigation will include taking a look back at Circle’s financial results from both 2021 and the first half of 2022, data that we will cross with results from USDC in the back half of 2022. And, yes, we’ll need to talk about FTX at least a little bit.

Thoughts on the demise of Circle’s SPAC deal by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

Zenly, the popular social mapping app that Snap acquired five years ago, is going to shut down on February 3rd, 2023. This is going to be a sad day as there is nothing quite like Zenly.

The team based in Paris managed to create an app that was at the intersection of a utility app and a social app. More importantly, opening Zenly and using it every day was a delightful experience. The app should be considered as one of the most polished and innovative social app of all time — and an important example for other social app developers.

Zenly’s main feature lets you keep up with your friends’ locations. When you open the app, you can see if friends and family members are hanging out together and where they are right now. On top of that, Zenly has one of the most vibrant messaging experience in a social app.

More recently, Zenly added places. It was the most personal database of places as you could see your friends’ favorite bars and restaurants and even see their own personal map of places. It quickly became a modern Foursquare for my group of friends.

The development team also started rolling out its own maps. Essentially, Zenly was crazy enough to think that it could compete with Google Maps and Apple Maps with a team of 10 people working on a mapping project.

Instead of providing the most accurate map in the world, it was the most playful and iconic map app on my phone. You could see animated cars, boats, rubber ducks, trucks, sea creatures, etc. I spent quite a bit of time flying over Paris and discovering new areas.

Zenly was founded in 2011. The startup was growing nicely, but things became serious after the 2017 acquisition by Snap. Earlier this year, Zenly reached 35 million monthly active users.

And 2022 has been a pivotal year for the social app. After launching a complete redesign, Zenly’s co-founder and CEO Antoine Martin left the company. “We joined Snap five years ago and we started working on Zenly 11 years ago. I want to move on. And I haven’t had the opportunity to take a long paternity leave,” Martin told me in an interview earlier this year.

A few months later, Snapchat’s parent company Snap surprised everyone by announcing that it would shut down Zenly as part of a round of layoffs. Sure, Zenly wasn’t as big as Snapchat. Sure, there was no monetization strategy. But it was a popular, innovative and extremely promising app.

And yet, Snap decided that it didn’t want to sell Zenly to another company or create a spin-off company. Zenly would have become a competitor — in particular, it would have been an alternative to Snap Map.

All of this leads us to the end of Zenly, the social app that helped you spend more time with friends and discover new places. I created my Zenly account on July 30, 2015 (or 2,685 days ago). And now, I have 59 days remaining to use the app. It sucks.

Zenly was the best social app and it will (sadly) shut down on February 3rd by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

Just days after co-CEO Bret Taylor announced his resignation, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield announced that he will be stepping down in January. Business Insider first reported the news. Salesforce has confirmed the news with Salesforce by email.

The company also announced that Lidiane Jones, who has been the executive VP & GM for digital experiences clouds at Salesforce, would be taking over for Butterfield, leaving a succession plan that had apparently been lacking when Taylor surprised everyone by stepping down last week.

“Stewart is an incredible leader who created an amazing, beloved company in Slack. He has helped lead the successful integration of Slack into Salesforce and today Slack is woven into the Salesforce Customer 360 platform,” the company said in a statement.

The statement went on to discuss the succession plan: “Stewart also was instrumental in choosing Lidiane Jones as the next Slack CEO to lead it into its next chapter. Lidiane has a strong background in customer and enterprise tech and has been among Salesforce’s leadership for over three years. We’re grateful for Stewart and excited for Lidiane as she takes over the reins at Slack.”

Butterfield came to Salesforce when the company bought Slack for $27 billion at the end of 2020. This comes on top of the news on Thursday, that Tableau CEO Mark Nelson would be stepping down. It makes you wonder, what is going on in the C-Suite at Salesforce.

Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, who has been watching Salesforce since its earliest days, says this could explain why Benioff looked so upset at last week’s earnings’ call, even beyond the initial shock of Taylor’s announcement. “My first is thought was that things like this usually happen in threes — first was Bret, the next day the Tableau CEO, Mark Nelson, and now this. But with the Bret being the architect of the $27B Slack acquisition and now the founder/CEO announcing his departure within days of each other, you kind of feel like this was the other shoe to drop. And this news must’ve been another reason why Marc was so visibly shaken last week when he announced Bret was stepping down,” Leary told TechCrunch.

Butterfield began is entrepreneurial journey when he helped found the photo sharing site, Flickr in 2004. He sold that company to Yahoo a year later (the current version of Yahoo owns this publication). He would later found a game called Glitch. The game didn’t go anywhere, but the company’s internal communication platform would later become Slack, the company he named in around 2013. It quickly grew in popularity and eventually went public in 2019 before Salesforce bought it in late 2020.

He told TechCrunch at the time of the sale that he had originally approached Taylor about buying Quip from Salesforce. Instead, that discussion led to Salesforce buying his company.

“I actually talked to Bret in the early days of the pandemic to see if they wanted to sell us Quip because I thought it would be good for us, and I didn’t really know what their plans were [for it]. He said he’d get back to me, and then got back to me six months later or so,” Butterfield said.

At that point, the conversation flipped and the companies began a series of discussions that eventually led to Salesforce acquiring Slack.

Now Butterfield is stepping away. Perhaps the timing of all these announcements is all a huge coincidence, but it sure feels like piling on at the moment. Salesforce has always had a deep bench of executives, but that talent pool is more than a bit thinned out after these three announcements in quick succession.

Salesforce stock is down almost 5% this morning.

Confirmed: Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield stepping down in January by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

Low and no-code application building continues apace. Gently hum “Row row row your code, gently down the streams,” as we talk with the founder behind Rowy, the company that’s like Airtable on a lot of steroids, or Excel on a lot of steroids and a couple of lines of illegal substances. Of course, low-code solutions aren’t new, but they’re usually most useful for low-volume applications, with companies outgrowing their tools and needing to rebuild the tech stack. Rowy is aiming higher, wanting to makeproducts accessible to anyone who is a spreadsheet power user, creating software backends that can develop and scale over time.

“Last week, Chat GPT from OpenAI showed the world a sliver of what the latest AI models are capable of. Large language models and generative AI capabilities are incredible and have opened many people’s eyes to the possibilities. Similarly, Rowy is going to show the world what AI is capable of when it comes to coding,” said Harini Janakiraman, Co-founder and CEO of Rowy in an interview with TechCrunch.

The company told us its aim is to create a system that can turn anybody’s vision into a digital product. “If you can use Excel, then you can use Rowy,” is the chorus the company keeps repeating in its mission to help entrepreneurs bring their projects, companies, and passions to life.

“Our aim is to lower the cost, time, and geographic barriers to entrepreneurship, so that anyone, anywhere with an idea can make it real. We are on the cusp of an entrepreneurial renaissance, and I see Rowy playing a huge part in it at scale,” said Janakiraman. “I am personally driven to make software development easier, simple, and accessible for everyone. More people should be building and innovating. Instead of focusing on the core business functionality, there is a lot of valuable developer time that gets wasted on figuring out how to build, deploy, set up DevOps, and on many other complexities in the development process.”

Speed to delivery is one thing, but the company is really doubling down on making it possible to continue to use Rowy, even after products hit production scale loads from eager users.

The company is based in Australia, and just closed a $3 million funding round on SAFE notes, led by Worklife Ventures (who, notably, are investors in Webflow and WorkOS).

“I am based in Sydney Australia, and thanks to the new norm of working remotely, I was able to connect with top Silicon Valley investors with a deep understanding of the space to support us in this journey. Our investors have helped us unlock great network opportunities for Rowy,” says Janakiraman. “With our lead investor, Brianne Kimmel from Worklife, we found the right partner for us who is aligned with our vision and has backed companies building modern tools for the next generation of makers at the earliest stages.”

With the money freshly and safely deposited in the bank account, the company is focusing on expanding the applicability of its platform to a broader set of backend templates, more extensive demos on its experimentation playground, and more. So far, it has demos for OpenAI GPT-3, Google Cloud Vision, a Stable Diffusion to Twitter Bot, and many more, that anyone can explore, clone, and get started.

“We are also building AI-native experiences in Rowy to help auto-generate backend code. We are seeing promising results with our early users as the generated code is more accurate as Rowy knows the context of your database and cloud platform,” says Janakiraman. “We have also been building Rowy in open-source and have an amazing community of over 6K developers across Github and Discord.”

In addition to raising her startup baby, Janakiraman had a newborn last year, and our conversation took us to what it was like to do both at once.

“Being a mother and a founder has made me way more efficient in how I put my time to use. I have always loved problem-solving and being organized but I think one thing that doesn’t get highlighted is how mothers are naturally amazing at multi-tasking,” she said. “This is something that I have gotten really good at over the last year and is a critical skill for being a founder. This has also made me all the more determined to be building something that creates the highest impact in the lives of builders, makers, and developers – so that they can focus on utilizing their time creating meaningful products.”

If Rowy has its way, if you can use Excel, you can build software by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch