Author : zebethcontrol

As product-led growth expands, Loops digs into the data to track key metrics • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Enterprise, product marketing, product-led growth, scale venture partnersNo Comments

Companies are increasingly looking at product led growth, where the product helps drive market expansion. If you’re giving the people what they want, they will spend more money, or so the theory goes, but how do you actually measure progress? That’s where an early stage startup called Loops comes in. It announced a $14 million seed, a hefty amount by today’s standards, to help companies look at a variety of data sources and answer specific questions about how they are measuring up. Company co-founder and CEO Tom Laufer says that he led a similar operation at Google before starting his company, and he saw smaller companies without Google’s resources, struggling to pull the data together to understand how well they were doing against their product goals. “So many [product-led growth] enterprises today struggle to make data-driven decisions because they face torrents of data [and struggle to turn that into] real insights and real opportunities,” Laufer told ZebethMedia. He says this isn’t a dashboard with lines going up and down. Instead it’s a solution that offers very specific suggestions designed to answer individual questions and improve things like conversion, retention, engagement and monetization. Loops providing a specific insight in how to improve conversion to paying customers. Image Credits: Loops Loops connects to various data sources, and using machine learning models, bring back answers to the product team about how to improve their metrics based on the data that Loops finds — and importantly they are able to do this without a team of data scientists to pull the data together. And this was a key reason that Ariel Tseitlin, partner at lead investor Scale Venture Partners was attracted to the company. “Loops gives you the ability to essentially package up those insights in a way that is repeatable and automated without actually having to incur the expense of [building a data science team]. So there’s a real powerful cost savings element there as well,” he said. The startup currently has around 20 people with plans to add more with the new funding, which closed recently. As he grows his workforce, Laufer says building a diverse company is a key factor for him. “We are literally doubling down on diversity including minorities and not just because it’s the right thing to do, it protects the future of the company by creating better brainstorming, better collaboration,” he said. Today’s round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from Cardumen Capital and a host of industry angels.

Contentstack raises $80M to grow its headless CMS platform for the enterprise • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Apps, content management system, contentstack, Enterprise, headless CMS, startup, StartupsNo Comments

The market for enterprise content management systems (CMS) is steeply growing as the need to organize and manage documents, images and other forms of digital content increases. According to Allied Market Research, the entire CMS sector combined could be worth $53.2 billion by 2030, up from $21.5 billion in 2020. While the concept of CMS has been around for decades, a relatively new innovation — so-called headless CMS — is beginning to attract both market share and the interest of investors. Headless CMS systems act primarily as content repositories, managing back-end infrastructure while affording plenty of customization on the front end. They’re similar to widgets or plug-ins on a website; a headless CMS is usually combined with a separate presentation layer that handles the design and structure elements, templates and the like. Contentstack is one of several vendors offering a headless CMS geared toward enterprise customers. The company today announced that it raised $80 million in a Series C round co-led by Georgian and Insight Partners, which also saw participation from Illuminate Ventures. Having raised $169 million to date, Contentstack plans to put the funding toward customer acquisition, geographic expansion, new partnerships and product development, CEO Neha Sampat tells ZebethMedia. “Contentstack empowers marketers and developers to deliver composable digital experiences at the speed of their imagination through automated headless CMS technology,” Sampat said via email. “Composable architectures ensure that enterprises can innovate swiftly, deploy new features rapidly, and remain agile in the face of digital disruption. Nobody gets ‘stuck’ with monolithic systems that don’t grow with the business or the world.” Contentstack, which was founded in 2018, was created on the back of fifteen-year-old consulting firm Raw Engineering and Built.io, an app development platform that Raw Engineering launched in 2013. (Closing the loop, Contentstack eventually bought the CMS division of Raw Engineering in 2018). Sampat — who co-founded Built.io — teamed up with Nishant Patel, the former VP of engineering at Software AG (which ended up acquiring Built.io) and Built.io’s second co-founder, to launch Contentstack. A look at Contentstack’s CMS platform for enterprises, which leans into workflow automation and customization. Image Credits: Contentstack Contentstack competes with headless CMS vendors, including Storyblok, which raised $47 million in May for its CMS aimed at nontechnical users, and Prismic, which recently raised $20 million to build out its fully managed CMS. (An interesting data point: VCs have invested over $118 million in CMS startups in the last year alone.) Strapi and Kontent are among the startup’s other rivals. But Sampat makes the case that Contentstack is the only CMS offering automation capabilities that don’t require code. Using the workflows in Contentstack, users can review, approve and publish content across their organization. A marketplace offers a hub for extensions, apps and integrations built by customers, partners and the company’s own engineering team. “Typically, content management requires a lot of backend development and programming skills. There is a risk that comes with that, for example, the risk of breaking other processes, enduring the cumbersome and lengthy requirements to implement the solution into the tech stack, and a lack of flexibility to change or maintain the flow of content,” Sampat said. “With Contentstack’s composable architecture, enterprises can tailor their martech stack and tools to their unique brand, team and customer experience needs quickly and easily unlocking the full potential of a composable tech stack.” Is Contentstack’s platform that much easier to use than the competition’s? Perhaps. Data shows, however, that many organizations struggle to use CMS to its full potential regardless of the vendor. In a 2021 survey released by the Content Marketing Institute, 56% of employees said that integration issues stymied their implementation of CMS while 55% blamed a lack of training. The company, which has more than 400 employees, appears to have won over enterprises regardless, though, with a client base that includes Shell, JPMorgan Chase, HP, McDonald’s and Mattel and several unnamed public sector agencies. The company claims to have doubled its customers since last summer and surpassed 50,000 users on the platform. “The pandemic and recent economic pressure has generated a major shift in the market, causing enterprises to review the performance of their existing digital investments and shift focus to efficiency. Ultimately, this means enterprises now have a higher standard for the return on investment in digital investments,” Sampat continued. “For digital strategy, having a composable architecture enables the speed to iterate and keep up with the constantly changing conditions and demands. Contentstack is well-positioned to empower these digital leaders to outperform through a ‘value- and success-based’ approach coupled with a proven path to a modern, composable architecture that will scale and adapt for the long term.”

Zest wants to make buying and sending gifts online ‘delightful’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Apps, boxgroup, character, Commerce, eCommerce, funding, GV, operator partners, startup, StartupsNo Comments

While e-commerce was on the rise before the pandemic, the massive shift to digital supercharged the online shopping industry — bringing entirely new categories of products (and shoppers) to the web. According to Adobe, Americans have spent a record $1.7 trillion online over the last two years, a 55% uptick from two years before the pandemic. A fair number of those online purchases are gifts as revealed by search trends — from 2019 to 2020, there was an 80% increase in searches for “online gifting” on Google Search. But despite the fact that hundreds of billions of people now regularly turn to digital channels (e.g. Amazon) to gift, the gifting experience remains subpar. That’s the opinion of Alex Ingram, at least, who co-founded a startup — Zest — that’s focused on e-commerce gifting flows. Zest is Ingram’s second company after Sunlight Health, which sought to make brand-name and specialty prescription medications affordable for patients with chronic conditions. He met Zest’s second co-founder, Jeremy Feinstein, while working at Flatiron Health, where they helped to develop cancer center software. “After Flatiron’s sale to Roche, we both felt it was time for something new,” Ingram told ZebethMedia via email. “Obviously, e-commerce is worlds away from oncology. But we wanted to build something that could really help small- and medium-sized businesses to succeed in an increasingly challenging environment.” Image Credits: Zest With Zest, Ingram says that the goal was to make the experience of online gifting “delightful.” How? By allowing e-commerce brands to embed a “send as a gift” button on their product or cart pages and letting givers choose a digital greeting card, add their own message, pay through Shopify and deliver the gift to the recipient via text or email. With gifts gifted through Zest, recipients — who can opt into shipping notifications — can add their own mailing address or customize the gift’s attributes (like size or color) and optionally send a thank-you note to the sender. There’s certainly something to affording recipients some choice in their online gifts. While it might ruin the surprise, a 2015 survey from Loop Commerce (now GiftNow) found that buying the wrong size and the hassle of online returns were some of the top reasons people were reluctant to buy gifts online. Ingram is well aware that Zest isn’t the only online gifting tool out there. There’s Goody, which has raised millions in venture capital for its mobile app that lets users send gifts via text. Givingli, an online gifting service that lets users customize digital greetings and send gifts to anyone, recently closed a $10 million equity round. GiftNow is perhaps Zest’s closest competitor, offering a checkout technology that lets customers buy gifts without having to worry about product details like size, color and shipping addresses. But Ingram argues that Zest uniquely takes a “brand-first” approach, helping brands grow by building direct relationships with their customers. “With some of the other gifting tools out there, the brands are almost an afterthought,” Ingram said. “Zest makes sending a gift a convenient and easy experience for shoppers, who never have to leave their favorite brand’s website — it’s as intuitive as clicking ‘Add to Cart’ or ‘Buy It Now.’ There are lots of e-gift card apps too, but we don’t believe e-gift cards are the future of gifting. They feel transactional and impersonal. They’re so forgettable that billions of dollars of gift cards go unused every year in the U.S. And many brands don’t like to deal with the accounting headaches that come with the long-standing liabilities of unused gift cards.” Image Credits: Zest The future of e-gift cards aside — to Ingram’s point, consumers seem to prefer physical gift cards over digital — Zest is evidently beating back rivals to gain a toehold in the gifting space, with about 50 customers across categories like food and beverage, apparel and flowers. Ingram wouldn’t disclose revenue figures. But he revealed that Zest has raised $4 million in seed funding led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) with participation from BoxGroup, Character, Operator Partners, Bungalow Capital and Company Ventures. “E-commerce and gifting exploded during the pandemic,” Ingram said. “People wanted to send more gifts to friends and family to help bridge the literal gap between them and loved ones. And while that growth rate has slowed, it’s a behavior that’s here to stay. [But] it’s never been harder for direct-to-consumer brands to acquire and retain customers. That’s partly due to the sheer number of direct-to-consumer brands out there today … For brands, the value we’re providing is first and foremost an elevated gifting experience for their customers. When it’s so easy and natural to send a gift directly from a product or cart page, these brands will sell more gifts and reach more people.”

AI-powered media editing app Descript lands fresh cash from OpenAI • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Descript, media, Media & Entertainment, OpenAI Startup Fund, podcasts, Robotics & AI, Startups, VideoNo Comments

Descript, the audio and video editing platform founded in 2017 by former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, has raised $50 million in a Series C round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, a tranche through which OpenAI and its partners, including Microsoft, are investing in early-stage companies. Descript is the second startup to receive a cash infusion from the fund after AI note-taking app Mem, and Mason says it reflects OpenAI’s belief in the future of Descript’s AI-powered features. “I founded Descript with the idea of building a simple, intuitive, fully-powered editing tool for video and audio — an editing tool built for the age of AI,” Mason told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “We’re on the verge of a generational change in the way we create content — fueled by AI. That includes the kind of tools like creators are already using in Descript, and emerging stuff like generative AI. The challenge for companies like ours is how to make that technology useful and accessible.” Mason wouldn’t reveal Descript’s valuation post-money, but he noted that the funding — which also had participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital and ex-Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross — brings the company’s total raised to $100 million. According to a report from The Information in October, OpenAI had agreed to lead funding valuing Descript at around $550 million, over double the startup’s valuation as of January 2021 ($260 million). “We started the OpenAI Startup Fund to accelerate the impact companies building on powerful AI will have on the world, and we’re particularly excited about tools that empower people creatively,” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, who manages the OpenAI Startup Fund, said in a press release. “It’s clear from using Descript and talking to customers that Descript is breaking down barriers between idea and creation by extending video editing capabilities to an entirely new class of creators.” Descript was created as a spin-off of Mason’s audio-guide business Detour, which Bose acquired in 2018. The platform, geared toward podcasters and videographers unfamiliar with professional-level editing tools, lets users create instant transcriptions of audio and video that can then be cut and paired with music, photos and other content using drag-and-drop tools. Coinciding with the new cash, Descript today unveiled a host of editing features — some powered by AI — and a redesign intended to make editing video “as easy as editing a doc or slides,” in Mason’s words. That might be overpromising a bit. But the new capabilities do indeed streamline aspects of content creation that have historically been arduous. For example, Descript now offers a background removal feature that lets users put their videos in any setting they want. And with write mode, users can edit scripts in Descript, tapping the platform’s Overdub voice cloning tech to scratch a voiceover. Descript’s redesigned editing interface, rolling out today, which adds features like templates and background removal for video. Image Credits: Descript Other highlights in the latest release of Descript, called Descript Storyboard, include multitrack screen recording — the recorder is now integrated into the editor, with separate tracks for screen and camera — and free access to stock sound effects, videos, images and music tracks. Descript also now provides new video transitions and animations and various templates, including layouts, titles sequences and social clips, along with the ability to create custom project templates. With the redesign, Mason says that the goal was to both complement and augment Descript’s transcript-based editor while leaving core functionality intact. A new experience called Scenes allows users to break scripts composed in write mode into scenes and then arrange the visuals they same way they’d work with slides in a deck. Scenes keeps voiceovers from Overdub aligned with the script, letting creators swap a scratch clip with the final recording, for example, without having to worry about the tracks falling out of alignment. “We believe video should be in every communicator’s toolkit, as ubiquitous as docs and slides. The tools are the only things preventing that, and we intend to change it,” Mason said. “We think of our main competition as non-editors — people who aren’t making video because the tools are too complex and time consuming.” Descript isn’t the only company competing in the audiovisual content editing space. Besides incumbents like Adobe, there are startups such as Reduct.Video, which uses AI, natural language processing and other tech to automatically create editable transcripts. San Francisco-based Descript, which employs about 100 people, has been aggressively expanding, however, acquiring AI company Lyrebird in 2019 to power its Overdub feature. Initially focused on audio editing, Descript launched its first video editing features two years ago, chasing after a digital video market that’s estimated to be worth more than $20 billion. The strategy appears to be working for Descript so far, which counted NPR, VICE, The Washington Post and The New York Times among its customers as of 2021. While Mason wouldn’t answer questions about revenue, he says that Descript’s client base has expanded in recent months to “major universities and nonprofits,” as well as organizations in the public sector. “The pandemic changed the way we all create and collaborate — a lot of people cooped up at home got more curious about video, and a lot of people started exploring the creator economy,” Mason said. “Companies started using video for more of their async communications. Around the same time, individual creators stopped respecting the boundaries between media; YouTubers started podcasts, podcasters flocked to TikTok and so on. Our new funding, plus the fact that all those things I just mentioned are only gaining energy, puts us in a great position to weather any headwinds.”

Impacked packs up $2.5M to give the packaging industry a greener tint • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Climate, Impacked, packaging, Startups, sustainable packaging, TenOneTen VenturesNo Comments

Packaging is a trillion-dollar-per-year industry that, by and large, has some sustainability challenges. Impacked is a B2B company that’s bringing green tech to the forefront for everything from jars, tubes and pouches to bottles. The company raised a $2.5 million seed funding round led by TenOneTen Ventures, taking its total funding raised to $3.3 million. The new funding will be used to recruit more primary packaging suppliers to Impacked’s marketplace across North America and Europe, and also enhance its existing sustainability scoring system. The company declined to share its valuation or other details about the funding round. “As a former global brand manager at Unilever leading product innovations, sourcing primary packaging was one of the biggest bottlenecks in my product launch process. The buying and selling process is long and inefficient with the industry still dependent on in-person trade shows, word of mouth and analog middlemen to generate new business. This frequently forces brands to overpay, delay product launches or deprioritize sustainability,” says Lisa-Marie Assenza, CEO at Impacked, in an interview with ZebethMedia. “My goal with Impacked is to bring the tradeshow online 365 days per year, providing tools for suppliers to digitize their sales and marketing while instantly allowing brands to search, filter, sample, quote and buy packaging — all in one place.” The founders at Impacked, Natasha Trueman (COO) and Lisa-Marie Assenza (CEO). Image Credits: Impacked. “TenOneTen is the lead investor in this round. We wanted to bring on a strong stable of former operators who have successfully built and scaled companies themselves. David [Waxman] and the entire TenOneTen team have been amazing to work with, understand our mission and our vision, and as former operators have been incredibly helpful in helping us navigate the early stage journey,” said Assenza. “As sustainability regulations continue to change and become more complex for brands to navigate, our goal is to help more brands navigate these challenges by ensuring that every product listed in our marketplace is scored across a standard set of environmental sustainability criteria, empowering brand owners to make better sourcing decisions and ensure accuracy in the claims they make on their packaging.” The company is broadening its appeal and supplier reach, both in terms of product lines, and geographically. Impacked is joining a huge number of companies flowing into this space at the moment, biting off different slices of the market. Some companies, such as Olive, are focusing on reusable packaging, while others are exploring mycelium-based or plant pulp-based solutions. Impacked’s ultimate goal is to “source every primary package on the planet, for the planet,” creating an ecosystem for packaging that will, the company claims, foster greater connectivity and collaboration between brands and suppliers in the packaging industry. “The health of our planet is one of the most important issues of our time, and packaging is clearly a major contributor. In the next 10 years, Impacked will play a key role in surfacing the data and insights brands need to shift to more sustainable packaging, all while driving supplier innovation in packaging materials, design and production practices that do better for our planet,” said Assenza. “I personally have a love/hate relationship with the word ‘sustainable’ — it’s buzzy and the reality is that there is not a single way to be ‘sustainable’. It’s really about taking steps to reduce the beginning-of-life and end-of-life impact of a brand’s packaging. I believe that shifting our industry to more sustainable solutions starts with education. Brands need a better way to objectively assess the environmental impact of any packaging option they are looking at, early in the buying journey. For example, if a brand knew upfront that adding a frosted coating could make an otherwise recyclable 8 oz glass bottle no longer widely recyclable, they might consider a different decoration option to maintain recyclability and accurately claim ‘recyclable’ on-pack.”

Attabotics raises another $71M to grow its vertical robotic warehouse solution • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in attabotics, Hardware, Robotics & AI, warehouse, warehouse roboticsNo Comments

“Amazon remains the best member of our business development team,” Attabotics founder and CEO Scott Gravelle says with a hint of snark, “as companies go look for alternatives and look for ways to stay competitive. Amazon has been setting customer expectation in North America for years. They’re the benchmark.” It’s a familiar story for anyone in the fulfillment space. Amazon’s success in warehouse robotics has effectively created its own industry. Many have followed in the company’s footsteps with Kiva-style robots, but Calgary-based Attabotics believes it has built out a new paradigm for the category. The company builds densely packed vertical storage structures that utilize robots and AI to find and fetch items. The company says it’s able to accomplish this in 15% of the standard warehouse space by building up. One of the major appeals of such a cost-saving system is that you can bring it to more densely packed urban environments. That means, among other things, bringing fulfillment centers closer to customers. The strategy has helped the firm drum up a good amount of funding since its 2015 founding. This week it announced a $71.7 million Series C led by Export Development Canada and featuring Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board. That brings its total funding up to $165.1 million. It’s a less than ideal time to be out there looking for funding, but Gravelle tells ZebethMedia that time was of the essence. “We’re not at the stage where we could have [waited],” he explains. Gravelle adds, “We’ve got some great traction with some great customers. We signed a deal with the DoD. So now it’s time to go from making stuff work to growing the business and deploying it and executing it.” In September, the firm announced Attabot 2022, the first commercialized version of its technology, which began rolling out to select customers a month prior. Per the company: Attabot 2022 is equipped with a flexible payload to accommodate larger bins up to 16” tall at 100lb – an increase of 25% from Attabotics’ previous robot release. Its ultra-lean, modular design translates into 60% fewer parts than the previous beta model and allows for further flexibility and forward compatibility. The company is continuing to grow its headcount — albeit cautiously — as it looks to fill 30 positions and expand beyond its engineering core. Attabotics’ current headcount is around 300.

Redwood Materials to supply Panasonic with cathode material in multi-billion-dollar deal • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in TransportationNo Comments

Battery materials and recycling startup Redwood Materials has landed a multi-billion-dollar deal to supply critical battery components to Panasonic as efforts accelerate to build a domestic supply chain in North America to support the coming influx of EVs. Redwood said Tuesday it will supply Panasonic Energy of North America with cathode material for battery cells produced at a new factory currently under construction in Kansas. The new $4 billion Panasonic factory, which will be larger than the Gigafactory operates with Tesla in Sparks, Nevada, is expected to begin mass production of its “2170” cylindrical lithium-ion batteries by March 2025. The deal, the largest yet for Redwood, is valued at several billion dollars. Lithium-ion batteries contain three critical building blocks. There are two electrodes, an anode (negative) on one side and a cathode (positive) on the other. Typically, an electrolyte sits in the middle and acts as the courier to move ions between the electrodes when charging and discharging. Cathode foils, which accounts for over half the cost of a battery cell, contain lithium, nickel and cobalt. Redwood is able to capture all of those materials through its battery recycling and processing. Initially, the cathode materials supplied to Panasonic at the Kansas factory will contain about 30% recycled lithium and nickel and 100% recycled cobalt, Redwood founder and CEO JB Straubel told ZebethMedia. That percentage will increase as more batteries — used in EVs and electronics — no longer have a useful life and enter into a pipeline where they’re recycled and processed by Redwood. “It’s a pretty exciting, real example of the closed loop ecosystem actually happening,” Straubel said, adding that he is confident the percentage of virgin material can get near zero. ” It will take a while for the industry as a whole to have enough material in circulation to do that. We’re a long way away from that for every element. But it can happen much sooner with things like cobalt.” Image Credits: Redwood Materials The Kansas factory deal expands on startup’s existing partnership with Panasonic. Several years ago, Redwood began recycling the scrap from battery cell production at the Gigafactory, extracting and then processing materials like cobalt, nickel and lithium that are typically mined, and then supplying to back to Panasonic. Redwood also recycles consumer electronics like cell phone batteries, laptop computers, power tools, power banks, scooters and electric bicycles to access, process and supply critical materials to companies like Panasonic and Amazon. The Carson City, Nevada-based company recycles about 10 gigawatt-hours of battery material annually, and “that’s increasing daily,” Straubel said. Redwood has since expanded beyond the recycling business, a move that is part of Straubel’s strategy to create a circular supply chain. In January, Redwood said it would supply Panasonic with copper foil produced from recycled materials, a critical component of the anode side of a battery cell. Redwood is expected to start producing the copper foil this month. Redwood is also producing the anode and cathode foils for companies like Panasonic and is making major investments in the U.S., including building its own factory, to bring cathode online and ramp production to 100 GWh, enough for 1 million EVs by 2025. Straubel, who wouldn’t give an exact investment figure, said the company is spending several billion dollars on these efforts. By 2030, Redwood said it expects production of both anode and cathode to scale to 500 GWh/year of materials, enough to power five million electric vehicles. Redwood has reached agreements with a number of automakers and other OEMs, including Ford, Proterra, Toyota and Volvo to collect, refurbish and recycle batteries and battery materials that can be sent to back to each company’s respective battery plant. Those deals will likely continue as automakers and cell manufacturers bring more production to the North America. The trend, which had started a couple of years ago, has accelerated with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. Within the massive climate-and-energy focused bill is a set of new parameters around EVs that prioritizes and rewards companies that bring battery cell production as well as vehicle assembly to North America. “The IRA sort of straps rocket boosters on this entire industry and direction,” Straubel said. “It obviously accelerates everything and it provides a lot stronger incentives and demand to do this sooner.”

Weka announces $135M investment on $750M valuation to change how companies move data • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in data, Enterprise, machine learning, storage, WekaNo Comments

If there’s one thing that gets the attention of investors, even in uncertain times like these, it’s data efficiency. Data is the fuel for machine learning models and getting it from point A to point B can be expensive and time consuming. That’s why a startup that can help make that process move faster with less friction is probably going to be valuable. Such is the case with Weka, a company that has come up with a way to virtualize data to make it easier to move between sources without having to make a copy first. Today, the company announced a $135 million Series D investment on a $750 million valuation, big numbers in today’s conservative funding environment. CEO and co-founder Liran Zvibel says the company originally focused on increasing data throughput for high performance computing scenarios. “The initial focus was high performance computing environments. And that’s really where the first phase of the company started. But increasingly, over the last two or three years, people have been taking concepts from high performance computing, scientific computing and applying them in a commercial context, trying to build large enterprise workloads,” Zvibel told ZebethMedia. He says that although network and compute have sped up, especially with the increased use of GPUs to help power data-intensive workloads, storage has remained a legacy bottleneck, and that’s the weak link his company is trying to attack. “Most people have made the leap to GPUs, and they made the leap to fast networking, but they’re trying to underpin it with storage technology and storage architectures from the 1990s,” he said. He claims to have invented an entirely new way of moving data. “We’ve invented a whole set of new algorithms, data structures, control structures, even network protocols. We’re not leveraging TCP/IP. We have a network protocol that allows you to leverage RDMA zero copy-like performance even on a public cloud,” he said. “And we sat down, we implemented all of that new new kind of computer science theory. And now we can actually show customers the huge advantages they can get with this new approach.” He admits the technology in some ways sounds like it’s science fiction, so companies often start small to prove it works, and once they do they sign much bigger deals. “When we come in and we tell the story, it sounds like a fairy tale or a science fiction. So customers tend to start small. When they realize we’re actually doing what we say we do then then they really go into hyperdrive,” he said. The company offers their solution as a service, but sometimes it’s delivered on prem and increasingly in the cloud with 43% of transactions in Q3 coming from public cloud business. They currently have 300 employees and expect to double in the next 12-18 months. He says that hiring a diverse workforce is top of mind for the company. “At the end of the day, we’re hiring the best talent we can find because building that is the most important thing, but we are putting a lot of thought and effort on turning over every rock to make sure we are more and more diverse.” Today’s round of funding came from a large group that includes traditional VC firms, as well as many strategic investors. The list includes 10D, Atreides Management, Celesta Capital, Gemini Israel Ventures, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hitachi Ventures, Key1 Capital, Lumir Ventures, Micron Ventures, Mirae Asset Capital, MoreTech Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, NVIDIA, Qualcomm Ventures and Samsung Catalyst. Today’s $750 million valuation doubles the previous valuation, according to the company. Weka has now raised over $293 million, per Crunchbase.

Pickle picks up $26M for its truck unloading robots • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Hardware, Pickle, Pickle Robot Company, robotics, Robotics & AI, truck, warehouseNo Comments

Fulfillment has arguably been the hottest robotics category over the past two years, as companies have looked to stay competitive with Amazon, even amid ongoing labor shortages. Still, one of the most important links in the chain remains one of the least addressed. Truck unloading isn’t a particularly easy problem to solve, but Pickle Robot Company is single-mindedly focused on it. When I paid a trip to the company’s offices on my trip to Boston last week, Pickle pointed out precisely how large of a problem this has become. Warehouse jobs are tough enough to fill these days, but unloading pallets and trucks bring their own spate of issues, including repetitive heavy lifting and wildly fluctuating temperatures. Imagine stepping foot inside a shipping container that’s been sitting in direct sunlight all day. Traditional heavy equipment like forklifts come with their own issues. The company describes their offering thusly, “Pickle is founded by a cast of MIT alumni. We are teaching off-the-shelf robot arms how to pick up boxes and play Tetris.” The company notes that it has “unload[ed] tens-of-thousands of packages per month at customer sites,” primarily in Southern California. The work thus far has been part of a pilot with United Exchange Corporation, which has deployed the system in a distribution center. Today Pickle is announcing a $26 million Series A raise led by Ranpak, JS Capital, Schusterman Family Investments, Soros Capital and Catapult Ventures. Image Credits: Pickle Robot Company “Customer interest in Pickle unload systems has been incredibly strong, and now that we have our initial unload systems out of the lab and into customer operations we have a clear path to broad commercialization,” said founder and CEO AJ Meyer. “The early customer deployments, financing and leadership additions set the stage for us to accelerate customer acquisition and build the company infrastructure we need to deliver more systems to more customers in the coming months.” That last bit is especially important. As you’re most likely aware, now is not a great time to be raising — even in a booming category like warehouse automation. But given the size and breadth of Pickle’s testing, putting funding off in hopes of better economic conditions isn’t necessarily an option when you’ve got product to deliver. And besides, Pickle’s not the only game in town either, figuratively or literally. Boston Dynamics notably chose truck unlocking as the focus for its second commercialized robot, Stretch. Unlike that solution, however, Pickle’s is tethered. Agility has also explored truck unloading for its Digit robot. Even with that added competition, we’re talking about a huge total addressable market, with room for more than one player.

WeaveGrid gets $35M Series B to help electrical grid cope with coming wave of EVs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Climate, EC Enterprise Applications, EC Food Climate and Sustainability, electric vehicles, Enterprise, renewable energy, Startups, utilitiesNo Comments

Today, the electrical grid works because utilities have a time-tested playbook. They may not know exactly when you do your laundry, but they generally know washers and dryers run more in the evenings or on weekends. Air conditioners wind up when temperatures soar, and more lights click on during the dark winter months. But in the coming years, that playbook is going to go out the window. Renewables will reshape the grid, but EVs will present the real challenge. Utilities may know how many solar panels and wind turbines are hooked up, but what about how many EVs get plugged in every night? They might have a rough estimate at best. That’s where WeaveGrid comes in. The company’s enterprise SaaS serves as a platform integrating data from utilities, automakers, and drivers to help utilities manage the load that EVs place on the grid. This data will be increasingly important in the coming decade, when up to half of the U.S.’ 280 million vehicle fleet is predicted to become electrified. WeaveGrid hopes not only to help utilities plan for new generating capacity, it also wants to assist in identifying where they can most effectively upgrade their distribution infrastructure, which is going to need a significant overhaul. The average age of the grid’s power transformers, for example, is 25 years. “If 280 million vehicles all start charging around the same time at night, it’s going to create a lot of pressure on an aging infrastructure that’s really not ready to handle all of these giant batteries charging in a completely erratic manner,” said WeaveGrid CEO Apoorv Bhargava. To help coordinate millions of vehicles charging — and to ensure they’re ready when drivers need them — WeaveGrid’s platform pulls data from utilities, automakers and even smart EV chargers to build a picture of when and where the grid will need the most power. The company is announcing a $35 million Series B led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from new investors Activate Capital, Emerson Collective, Collaborative Fund, and MCJ Collective. Existing investors Coatue, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Grok Ventures, and The Westly Group also invested in the round. It’s Salesforce Ventures’ first time leading a climate tech investment.