Author : zebethcontrol

Amazon Prime Video launches weekly livestream concert series ‘Amazon Music Live’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in Amazon, amazon music, Amazon Prime Video, livestream, Media & Entertainment, streaming serviceNo Comments

As more streaming services explore the livestreaming space, Amazon Prime Video is branching out beyond live sports and introducing a new weekly livestreamed concert series, “Amazon Music Live.” Next Thursday, October 27, at 9 p.m. PT, Amazon will launch the series which features rapper 2 Chainz as the host and performances by artists Lil Baby, Megan Thee Stallion and Kane Brown. In addition to live performances, 2 Chainz will interview each artist. More artists will be announced in the coming weeks. The first to take the Amazon Music Live stage is Lil Baby, who will perform his most recent album, “It’s Only Me.” Megan Thee Stallion will perform on November 3, and country artist Kane Brown will take the stage on November 10. “Amazon Music Live” will stream on Prime Video after “Thursday Night Football.” It will also be available on-demand for a limited time. This is unlike Apple’s concert livestreaming series, “Apple Music Live,” which streams exclusively on Apple Music– not Apple TV+. Amazon is likely hoping football fans and music listeners alike will check out the new series. Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football” is popular among subscribers, with millions of viewers watching each week. Amazon’s music subscription plan, which recently had a price hike, has an estimated 52.6 million subscribers. The two tech giants, Apple and Amazon, continue to compete against each other in music, live sports and streaming. Apple Music is predicted to reach 110 million paid subscribers by 2025 and recently became the official sponsor of the Super Bowl halftime show. However, Apple TV+ has yet to win rights to NFL’s “Sunday Ticket.” Live TV programming on Apple TV+ includes “Friday Night Baseball” and “MLB Big Inning.”

Cyberdontics raises $15M for robotic root canals • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in cyberdontics, dentist, Hardware, robotics, Robotics & AINo Comments

It’s been more than 20 years since the da Vinci Surgical System received FDA clearance. Pretty incredible when you think about it. Robotic surgery and automation in general have come a long way since then, and a number of companies have entered the lucrative category, focused on all manner of different procedures. Surprisingly, robotic dental procedures have been slow to follow. Let me get this out of the way up front — I’m squeamish about dental procedures. I don’t like thinking about them, don’t like talking about them and certainly don’t like having them. And like many of you reading this, I’m certainly not rushing out to have a robot perform a root canal on me any time soon. I said as much to dentist turned Cyberdontics founder and CEO, Chris Ciriello. Image Credits: Cyberdontics The executive notes that there are two big selling points here from the patient’s standpoint. First is efficacy. He says the system that Cyberdontics is developing will be capable of extremely accurate tooth cutting, down to around 30 microns. The second — and perhaps more important — is speed. “If you’ve had something like a root canal, a crown or any of these types of procedures, where you’re spending an hour or two in the dentist’s chair and you’re spending multiple trips to go back and get it fixed,” he explains, “the idea that you can literally have this robot in your mouth for under one minute and you can be out the door 15 minutes later, is a game changer. For people that really don’t like the dentist, this is a really attractive way to get in and out a lot faster.” The notion was attractive enough to warrant a $15 million Series A for the YC grad. The round, led by dentist chain Pacific Dental Services, will go toward additional R&D and bringing the system to market. The system is supervised by the dentist and, like surgery robots before it, is designed to level access to such procedures amid a dentist shortage. Image Credits: Cyberdontics “Today, a dentist would cut a hole in your tooth and fill the hole with some type of material, whether it’s a crown, a filling, some kind of plastic they squirt in,” says Ciriello. “What we do is scan your tooth, then we virtually create a model of what the tooth will look like after we cut it. Then we can cut your tooth and fabricate a prosthetic at the same time, or we can fabricate the prosthetic in advance of the surgery. Then that piece will fit in just like a puzzle piece, right into the hole we cut.” Cyberdontics “aspirationally” plans to launch its imaging process within the next year, with plans to introduce the robot within the next two, regulator approval depending.

Lyft increases service fees for riders amid rising insurance costs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in Lyft, ridehail, TransportationNo Comments

Lyft is increasing the service fees its riders in the U.S. pay for each ride. The rise in cost, which will go directly to Lyft, aims to cover the higher costs of insurance, reports Reuters. Lyft’s service fees pay for overhead costs like driver insurance and security background checks. The company expected a rise in insurance costs to affect Q3 margins, according to Lyft’s Q2 earnings call, which is one of the reasons it lowered full year guidance. At the time, Lyft hinted at changing its pricing structure to accommodate — the company really needs to increase its per-rider revenue, which actually decreased from Q4 2021 to Q1 2022, and remained flat from Q1 to Q2 despite a slight rise in active riders. But will this service fee increase be enough to help Lyft inch closer to traditional profitability, or will it only help offset the costs of rising insurance? Or worse, will the slight price increases send would-be Lyft riders into Uber’s cushioned seats? Uber told ZebethMedia that it has not increased its service fees, and according to data from YipitData, Uber’s service fee has stayed at $2.87 since 2020. “Lyft is facing insurance inflation pressures and we’ve nominally increased service fees to help offset these costs,” according to a statement shared with Reuters by a Lyft spokesperson. The spokesperson said the increase averages less than $0.50 per trip nationally, but YipitData’s numbers showed the service fee went up by an average of about $0.60, or an 18% increase, which implies a 3% increase in the cost of an average ride. The data also showed Lyft increased its service fee for riders in almost all 150 U.S. markets, except New York, in the first week of October. In San Francisco, Lyft’s service fee on a standard ride increased from $3.00 in January to $3.60 this week, according to data from web archiver Wayback Machine. For Lyft XL and Lux, the service fee increased from $2.75 to $3.35, and for Lux Black and Lux Black XL, it went from $2.05 to $2.65. In March, Lyft added a $0.55 surcharge that went directly to drivers to help cover the rising cost of fuel, which has since been dropped. Uber issued a similar surcharge at the time. While it shouldn’t affect riders too much, the current price hike might mean that Lyft takes a larger share of each fare in proportion to Lyft drivers, YipitData analysts said, according to Reuters. Lyft did not respond to ZebethMedia in time to comment.

Disrupt kicks off tomorrow — check out the highlights • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in Disrupt, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Happy ZebethMedia Disrupt eve! That’s right, tech’s OG conference dedicated to early-stage startup founders — and the ecosystem that supports them — kicks off tomorrow at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. No FOMO zone: It’s not too late to buy a pass and get in on all the action and opportunity. We’d love to see you! Here’s a quick look at just some of the sessions, speakers and other happenings you can take in over the next three days. Have a look at the agenda for times and stage locations and then fire up your event app, build your schedule and start connecting and networking with other attendees. Tuesday, October 18 Live on Stage: ZebethMedia’s Equity: Join Mary Ann Azevedo, Natasha Mascarenhas and Alex Wilhelm for a live recording of Equity, the podcast about the business of startups. They’ll unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines and will wade through the hype to keep you up-to-date on the world of business, tech and VC. How to Build Your Early VC Network — Turning Social Capital into Financial Capital: If you haven’t heard of Nik, Josh or Gefen, where have you been? They are founders who are not only building very interesting companies but have also taken a forward approach toward making noise on social media. We want to dive into how being a public person can help founders build a future public company. This is a panel that will be informative and lots of fun. Nik Milanović founder, This Week in Fintech, and general partner, The Fintech Fund; Joshua Ogundu, CEO, Campfire; and Gefen Skolnick, founder, Couplet Coffee. Winning the War on Ransomware: Ransomware attacks are escalating at an alarming rate. We’ll hear from experts about what winning the war on ransomware looks like and how startups can play their part. Brett Callow, threat analyst at Emsisoft, and Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO at Luta Security. Wednesday, October 19 The Art of Inclusivity with Kevin Hart: Financial inclusion is multifaceted: you’re fighting against homogeneous networks, deceptive warm intros and the basic need for more fluency across different demographics. There’s an art to it. Comedian and actor Kevin Hart, Mike Elanjian of Capital Connect by JPMorgan, and Robert Roman of HartBeat Ventures are joining us to talk about these very complexities. HartBeat Ventures will also chat about their work investing in the likes of Beyond Meat, Fabletics and Therabody, while JPMorgan will give us a look at how institutions are breaking down barriers. Michael Elanjian, head of digital investment banking and digital private markets at JP Morgan; Kevin Hart, founder at HartBeat Ventures; and Robert Roman, president and co-founder of HartBeat Ventures. Acing Venture: Serena Williams is the greatest to ever play the game of tennis, and she’s already made a name for herself as a VC in the tech world. At Disrupt, Williams and her Serena Ventures partner Alison Rapaport will join us to discuss the next chapter of Serena’s career, swapping out the racket for several (hundred) inbound pitch decks. We’ll talk about their investment thesis, her plans to bring more diversity into tech, and what she brings to the table as a VC. Serena Williams, founding and managing partner of Serena Ventures, and Alison Rapaport Stillman, founding and managing partner of Serena Ventures. From Court to Cast: Basketball stars are no strangers to diversifying their portfolios. For four-time NBA champion and Golden State Warriors power forward Draymond Green, that’s meant moving from the court to behind the mic. He joins us to discuss his successes on and off the court, including The Draymond Green Show podcast and the Prime Video special, “The Sessions: Draymond Green.” Draymond Green, NBA 4x champion and host of The Draymond Green Show. Thursday, October 20 State of VC in 2022: VCs have never had so much capital socked away — with $100 billion more in so-called dry powder than the end of last year, according to Preqin — but with a tightening exit market, many are “slowing their roll” and asserting more control over deals after years of feverish dealmaking. What new terms are they introducing into deals? Where are they forging ahead — and pulling back — and why? What do founders need to know for their startups to survive and thrive in 2023 and beyond? For a clearer understanding of what’s happening on the ground right now, this will be a must-see conversation. Niko Bonatsos, managing director of General Catalyst and Caryn Marooney, GP of Coatue Management. Steering Toward an Autonomous Future: A decade ago, Lyft launched in San Francisco as the friendly pink mustache–wearing ride-hailing service. Today, the company is the second-largest ride-hailing service in the U.S., runs a bike share business, has acquired and created and then sold a self-driving car unit — all while facing rival Uber, regulatory headwinds, lawsuits and the public market. Co-founder John Zimmer will talk about how it aims to remain competitive, what inflation and regulatory pressures may bring and where the next wave of growth will come from. Surveillance in Startup Land: Join us for a crash course in the surveillance state — from spyware makers to location data brokers. Find out what the changing cybersecurity threat and legal landscape means for today’s data-hungry startups. Jennifer Stisa Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and Maddie Stone, security researcher, Project Zero, Google. There’s so much more to experience at Disrupt — roundtables, breakout sessions, the Startup Battlefield 200 companies exhibiting on the expo floor and, of course, the Startup Battlefield competition. ZebethMedia Disrupt starts tomorrow, October 18, and run through October 20 in San Francisco. Latecomers are always welcome. Buy your pass right now, and we’ll see you at the Moscone Center! Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at ZebethMedia Disrupt 2022? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Discord doubles down on apps to make servers more dynamic • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in discord, Social, social mediaNo Comments

Discord is refreshing its popular chat app with a handful of new features, including one that developers who build tools for the platform have wanted for a long time. The changes seek to make the community-building app a more versatile place to hang out, with new ways to customize the servers where hundreds of thousands of people regularly gather around games, hobbies or even well-loved creators. Discord says that more than a third of its chat room-like servers use apps, often referred to as bots, already. The apps, miniature bits of automated software that run within Discord’s servers, offer utilities like moderation, digital DJing and basic games. Now, the company is introducing a full directory of apps, elevating the many bots and quirky bits of software that make Discord tick with a proper directory. The app directory, which launches on Tuesday, will give server admins a one-stop shop for ways to build out their server to their liking. There’s already an app for almost everything. A sneakerhead server tracking new releases might plug in the StockX DropBot app, while a role-playing community could play a text-based RPG together directly within chat with IdleRPG. On Discord, apps have largely been the realm of scrappy, small developers looking to build useful utilities. But it’s clear that the company’s vision for its in-server experiences is moving in a more official direction that could involve more official partnerships with big, established software makers. The company is also announcing an expansion on the games front, introducing “activities” that bring more elaborate mini games like virtual golf, chess and poker into servers. While they’re not limited to games — one activity lets users queue and watch YouTube videos together — the new feature is designed to offer server members more ways to casually hang out and spend time together. Discord’s new activities launch this week. All users will have access to Putt Party (virtual putt putt) and the Watch Together activity from the jump, while anyone subscribed to Discord’s premium Nitro membership can play additional games including poker, a Pictionary-like game, chess and a Scrabble clone called Letter League. Users who pay for Nitro can invite non-premium members to play the expanded roster of games, but non-premium users won’t be able to initialize the full suite of new games and activities. In addition to the app-focused changes, Discord is also adding a new entry-level subscription tier for Nitro that will cost less. Nitro Basic will cost $2.99 a month, offering some core features for casual users including custom emojis, larger file uploads and a profile badge. The new tier was available already for some users in the UK but it will launch globally on October 20.

Finding an exit from the ‘messy middle’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in 2023, Column, EC Column, EC venture capital, fundraising, limited partners, Startups, Venture, venture capitalNo Comments

Eric Tarczynski Contributor More posts by this contributor University entrepreneurship — without the university To predict what 2023 will look like for venture capital, we need to start by understanding where we are now. We’re entering a messy middle where prices continue to drop and the “2021” deal, industry slang for an investment made at an exorbitant price, is long gone. Companies can no longer raise $5 million to $10 million seed rounds with nothing but a deck and the assumption that revenue multiples will skyrocket beyond historical norms. The VC landscape has started to bifurcate, and it will continue to do so during 2023 both for fundraising and investments. Fundraising: A tale of two worlds Even though the best vintages originate during downturns, it’s difficult to allocate to something you’re already substantially overexposed to. In 2023, we will see two worlds emerge. The companies with the best talent, products and positioning will command capital at normalized market prices, and everyone else will experience a depressed market. Due to the Fed’s rate hikes and geopolitical tensions, the macro environment has slowed and inflation hit record levels. Investor confidence is down across the board and growth rounds are largely dead on arrival, with both seed and Series A valuations down by 30%-50%. It’s now questionable to pump money into a company that doesn’t have the traction to back up its worth. But this doesn’t mean all deals are off. Venture firms still have tens of billions of dollars to deploy, but they’re more hesitant about doing so now — growth, in particular, is experiencing a hanging-around-the-hoop effect that is likely to linger as the overall macro environment stays depressed.

the billionaire tantrum • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in SocialNo Comments

This morning Kanye West announced he’s buying Parler, the annoyingly-named so-called “free speech” platform that ignores the proper French pronunciation of its moniker in service of a poor pun. The deal terms aren’t out there yet, but the startup has so far raised $56 million and I bet it has a tidy little exit on its hands if this goes through. A spurned billionaire purchasing a social networking company because of perceived encroachments on their free speech rights (where none actually exist) seems… somehow familiar. Oh, that’s right: Elon Musk is doing basically the same thing, on a grander and more litigious scale. Elon and Kanye have history, of course, and the Tesla founder was quick to welcome Ye back to Twitter when the latter was blocked from Instagram for anti-semitic posts. Kanye quickly used Twitter to push more anti-semitic trash, however, leading to him having his account locked and Musk then issuing a weak admonishment (if you can even call it that) for his pal’s inexcusable behavior. Leaving aside that Musk’s response is a terrifying vision of what moderation on Twitter could become if the multi-CEO gets his wish and does complete the $44 billion transaction to acquire the platform, the interaction and Monday’s Parler news say a lot about where we are socially and the state of the media tech industry. In particular, watching these two over-moneyed and over-indulged boys spend their way to “uncancelable” status illustrates a lucrative new exit path for startups looking to disrupt the status quo when it comes to letting people say things they shouldn’t say. It used to be that billionaires having a temper tantrum would result in the death of media outlets, but the new trend seems to be not attempting to quash the object of their ire, but instead spending boatloads of cash to warp a collective social viewpoint to fit their specific worldview. Whether that money is their own, or the collective wealth of their fawning retinue of deep-pocketed sycophants scarcely matters — there’s a lot of economic opportunity to be had for down-on-their-luck networking tools with flexible moral outlooks. This is only half tongue-in-cheek: There really have been a lot of startups and companies cropping up to address the social media companies being allowed to “control what we can and cannot see,” as one extremely mistaken ex-attempted despot put it. In a sane market those would need to contend on the measures we typically use to judge startup success: User traction and engagement, revenue, etc. Now, it looks like they might be able to use a bruised ego to help their investors return the fund.

PayPal debuts a new rewards program that combines Honey’s discounts with other ways to earn • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in Apps, discounts, e-commerce, Fintech, PayPal, rewards, shoppingNo Comments

PayPal is taking a step away from the Honey brand, the $4 billion shopping rewards acquisition it made in 2019, with today’s launch of PayPal Rewards. The new program will replace “Honey Gold” — the rewards program for Honey browser extension users, which allows customers to redeem their points for cash, gift cards or PayPal shopping credits. With the new PayPal Rewards, consumers will be able to track and redeem their points directly inside the PayPal app, and will have new ways to earn, the company says. The deal for Honey was intended to give PayPal a better position in the face of the increased competition in the payments space from larger rivals, including Appl, Google and even Facebook (now Meta). The battle for consumer adoption of online and mobile payments had shifted away from the checkout page itself, to compete against all the other places people go to discover, browse, get inspired and deal-hunt — including on retailers’ sites and on social platforms, like Instagram, Pinterest, and today, TikTok. A rewards program, like the one offered by Honey, works to entice users by offering promo codes and coupons for favorite retailers, while redirecting them away from Amazon with better prices. Features like the price tracking “droplist” also help consumers find the best deals on items they’re considering. And, with last year’s revamp of the PayPal app, personalized deals and rewards became a larger part of the mobile experience as well. This year, PayPal customers have saved nearly $200 million through the Honey cash back and discounts program, says PayPal. With the launch of PayPal Rewards, the company is now combining the rewards being offered to PayPal customers across multiple PayPal products, including the Honey browser extension, the PayPal app, and, in the future, various card products. Rewards will also be given its own dedicated spot in a new part of the PayPal app, where shoppers can track and redeem their points as they earn. When customers want to redeem their points, there won’t be category restrictions or account minimums, the company notes, and the points can be converted to cashback at a rate of 100 points equaling $1 USD. Once redeemed as cash, the funds can be transferred to a linked bank account, deposited into a PayPal Savings account, donated to a charity, or sent to someone else as a peer-to-peer (p2p) payment. With the new in-app hub, customers will also be able to earn points through personalized engagement in the PayPal app, in addition to the browser extension, and will be able to be stacked with the rewards earned from their payment card programs. This personalized engagement introduces a new way for a customer to earn PayPal Reward points by doing things like linking a debit card or bank account to their PayPal, for example. If the customer has already done so, they might be presented with a different action to take. Image Credits: PayPal The company is touting the move ahead of the 2022 holidays and traditionally, the biggest quarter for online shopping. This year, however, the e-commerce landscape is looking a little different, with more spending expected to start earlier thanks in part to Amazon’s decision to host a second Prime Day event in October, leading other retailers to follow suit. Still, Adobe predicts consumer spending will still increase this year by 2.5% during the Nov. 1-Dec. 31 time frame, reaching $209.7 billion. “With the financial challenges people face these days, brought on by rising prices and the need to tighten budgets, it can be frustrating to shop for everyday essentials or plan for the holidays,” said Greg Lisiewski, Vice President of Shopping and Global Pay Later, in a statement about the launch. “PayPal Rewards makes it easy to find sales, discounts, and great deals when making a purchase with PayPal – through cash back, discount codes, or other rewards,” he said. Image Credits: PayPal

Driverless in Phoenix and GM takes its EV offensive beyond vehicles • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in TransportationNo Comments

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive the full edition of the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. This is a shorter version of The Station newsletter that is emailed to subscribers. Want all the deals, news roundups and commentary? Subscribe for free. Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. ZebethMedia Disrupt is finally here! We’re back in person and I couldn’t be more excited about the guests we’ll have on our multiple stages and all the folks I will meet there. I hope you’re one of them. Earlier this week, I took a quick jaunt over to Phoenix to check out what Waymo is up to on the trucking and robotaxi fronts. It’s been a minute since I took a driverless ride in a Waymo. And the last time it was a Chrysler Pacifica. This time, I took a spin in downtown Phoenix in a driverless Jaguar I-Pace (sans human safety driver). The driverless rides in downtown Phoenix are not open to the public just yet. For now, only vetted people who have signed non-disclosure agreements and are part of Waymo’s “trusted tester” program can hail these rides. That meant I had a Waymo employee use their phone to hail the ride for me. We spent about 30 minutes driving around, reaching a destination, departing the vehicle and then hailing it again. A few months ago, Waymo rolled out an important improvement to its self-driving system. The specific change was the planning piece (as in planning and perception) of the software, according to senior product manager Pablo Abad. This newer version leans more heavily on machine learning and neural nets than it has in the past. Adad explains: “Coding for all these different scenarios more manually can take time, as you can imagine,” Adad said. “As you build up more and more and more of these heuristics, it becomes harder for other developers to come in and tweak certain parameters without affecting other parts of the system. So instead, you give the system all of this training data, allow it to learn the best behavior in certain situations on its own, rather than having to manually get in there and insert heuristics.” The result is a system that can handle more dynamic situations and improves more quickly. During my ride, the vehicle was able to smoothly execute trickier situations (like double parked vehicles) than I remember. It also allows Waymo to more easily fold new features in. For instance, as I was exiting, the robotaxi gave me a visual and audio alert that another vehicle was approaching from behind to ensure I didn’t whip my door open to wide on the busy street. It will also alert riders to upcoming cyclists. My experience in downtown Phoenix has me curious (more than ever) about how Waymo’s robotaxis operate in San Francisco. And Cruise, for that matter. You can always email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, opinions, or tips. You also can send a direct message to @kirstenkorosec Micromobbin’ Amazon plans to double the number of micromobility hubs it has in Europe as it explores ways to clean up its logistics network. What if Apple decided to screw the secretive electric car project and actually just make an e-bike? Bloomberg explores that question. Bird published an independently verified Life Cycle Analysis for its Bird Three 2-scooter, which shows the scooter has a lifespan of up to five years after refurbishment and is one of the lowest GHG emitters in Europe compared to public transport, cars and other shared micromobility vehicles. Radio Flyer, the toy company famous for its little red wagon, has launched a folding cargo e-bike. The bike has a 5-level pedal assist and a throttle, and comes with the option to add on accessories like storage bins, cargo container and child seats. Waymo joins Argo AI in endorsing the six technical guidelines for safe autonomous vehicle-cyclist interactions from the League of American Bicyclists. You’re reading an abbreviated version of micromobbin’. Subscribe for free to the newsletter and you’ll get a lot more. Deal of the week No big deal of the week this time around. Instead, here’s a list of the ones that got my attention. Ascendant Mobility Acquisition I, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) focused on mobility, withdrew its plans for an initial public offering. The SPAC was co-led by former Tesla execs Peter Bardenfleth-Hansen and Jochen Rudat. Bird amended its $150 million vehicle financing credit facility so that it doesn’t have to pay money back during the slow, dead winter months and can ramp up payments during the spring and summer months, which the company says will help reduce interest and amortization payments. Interesting news as we get closer to Q3 earnings. Delta Air Lines invested $60 million into Joby Aviation and announced plans to launch an eVTOL service that will transport Delta passengers from local vertiports directly to airports, starting in Los Angeles and New York. Kodiak Robotics secured a $30 million growth capital credit facility from Horizon Technology Finance Corporation. Zoomcar, the Indian car rental startup, plans to go public in the United States through a merger with special purpose acquisition company Innovative International Acquisition Corp. The combined company is valued at $456 million including debt. Want more deals? A whole list of them, including info on Aptiv, TerraWatt and TruckSmarter, were in the subscription version this week. Subscribe for free here. Notable reads and other tidbits Autonomous vehicles Akshay Jaising, Motional’s vp of commercialization, chatted with ZebethMedia about the company’s go-to-market strategy after its most recent deal with Uber. Starship Technologies is partnering with Grubhub to deliver food via sidewalk delivery robots in college campuses across the U.S. Waymo cafeteria workers at the Mountain View-based company site are forming a union, citing the high cost of living in the Bay Area and the

Ambi Robotics secures $32M infusion to deploy its item-sorting robots in warehouses • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in ambi, ambi robotics, Bow Capital, Robotics & AI, startup, Startups, tiger globalNo Comments

Ambi Robotics, a startup developing supply chain automation hardware, today announced that it raised $32 million in additional funding led by Tiger Global and Bow Capital, with participation from Ahren and logistics firm Pitney Bowes. Pitney Bowes is a strategic investor in Ambi, having recently inked a $23 million deal with the company to deploy Ambi’s hardware in U.S.-based Pitney Bowes fulfillment centers. The new capital came in the form of a SAFE, or simple agreement for future equity, which grants investors the right to purchase equity in the company at a future date, allowing Ambi to delay negotiations around valuation and terms of investment. CEO Jim Liefer says that it’ll be put toward continuing deployments and installations of Ambi’s tech, expanding the company’s product portfolio and growing engineering, customer support and operations teams headcount. “This additional funding round came together very quickly, spawning from a ‘normal’ company update to our existing investors and partners,” Liefer told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “It sparked interest to further fuel manufacturing and deployments of our current and future categories of AI-powered parcel sorting systems … Just this year, our team has more than doubled and we will continue to add engineering and customer success talent and other areas to keep pace with customer demand for our robotic solutions across their operations.” The co-founders of Ambi — including Ken Goldberg, the chair of the industrial engineering and operations research department at UC Berkeley — years ago discovered clever techniques to train robots in simulation and transfer those learnings to the real world. After a breakthrough on a system called Dex-Net, Goldberg and Jeff Mahler, a former doctoral student, launched the company in 2019, along with other scientists and engineers from UC Berkeley. Dex-Net, short for Dexterity Network, is an AI system that trains on thousands of images of 3D models of objects. Using deep learning, the system scans the data and uses algorithms to learn the best way to pick up the objects. A row of Ambi’s autonomous item-sorting robotic arms deployed to a warehouse floor. Image Credits: Ambi Robotics Ambi’s robotics platform builds on this to automate processes primarily in logistics and fulfillment. The company claims its products, which include robotic arms and the software to run them, can be “taught” to pick and pack millions of unique items while adapting to different packaging (e.g. boxes and envelopes) on the fly. Using “end effectors” like suction cups, Ambi machines pick, scan, insert, place and pack items arranged in mail sacks on fulfillment center floors in tandem with workers. Software running in the background analyzes data on productivity, item dimensions and weights, utilization and more and identifies “pick points” on items in cluttered environments like conveyor belts, totes and bins. Customers pay upfront for Ambi’s robotics units and then pay a monthly subscription cost for use of the software. “The team at Ambi Robotics brings a new way of thinking about traditional problems,” Liefer said. “With advanced tech that can solve a wide range of real-world problems, the team [has] decided to use their expertise to drive the exploding ecommerce industry toward a sustainable supply chain, so the strain of sorting parcels doesn’t rest on the shoulders of our most valuable asset — people.” Liefer says that Ambi’s current focus is deploying the latest generation of its robotics tech, AmbiSort A-Series v3, which features a “soft-touch” end effector that can handle both deformable and rigid items. Ambi claims that warehouse associates can work alongside three to four of these systems to increase the average throughput per employee to over 1,200 items sorted per hour. Ambi competes with Covariant, Nomagic, Soft Robotics, Pickle, Hai Robotics, XYZ Robotics and RightHand, among others, in a favorable investment climate for robotics. According to Crunchbase, more than $17 billion poured into VC-backed robotic startups in 2021 — nearly triple the investment in 2020. In April, Amazon announced that it would create a new $1 billion fund to back companies working in the customer fulfillment, logistics and supply chain sectors. And in May, Walmart expanded its partnership with robotics startup Symbotic to install the latter’s machines into all of Walmart’s distribution centers in the U.S. As of 2019, the global warehouse automation market was worth about $15 billion, according to Statista. That number is expected to double within the next four years, with supply chain executives in an Accenture survey citing automation as one of their top three investment priorities — workers’ concerns about the tech aside. Leifer says that Ambi, for its part, began generating revenue through commercial deployments in October 2020, installing systems prior to the peak holiday buying season. The company is currently in the process of installing 80 parcel-sorting systems while supporting more than 80 “full-stack” sorting systems across 15 sorting hubs. Gregg Zegras, EVP and president of global e-commerce at Pitney Bowes, added in an emailed statement: “Ambi Robotics is an important part of an innovation strategy that is helping Pitney Bowes improve service to our clients and efficiently grow our global ecommerce business. In Ambi Robotics, we see the same commitment to client-led innovation that has helped Pitney Bowes evolve and win in the marketplace for over 100 years. We look forward to continuing to work together to drive innovation in our global ecommerce hubs.” Berkeley-based Ambi, which recently moved into a new HQ, has raised $67 million to date and has more than 50 employees.