Zebeth Media Solutions

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Beam raises $6.4M to help citizens access safety net funds • ZebethMedia

Beam, a startup that helps citizens access government financial aid, has raised $6.4 million in Series A funding. The company, previously known as Edquity, helps deliver funds across a wide array of programs, like emergency cash assistance, rental relief and public utility benefits. “We fundamentally work to transmit critical services and resources to those in need,” said David Helene, CEO of Beam. The company’s Series A funding comes as the company said it saw a greater need to provide disadvantaged communities with financial support following the COVID-19 pandemic. Beam said the funds will be used to expand its headcount and further develop its platforms. The round was led by Potencia Ventures, with participation from Spring Point Partners, American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact, Imaginable Futures, Lumina Impact Ventures, Michelson Runway, and Schmidt Futures. Beam, when partnered with governments, operates as the end-to-end cash assistance administration system, which handles applications, ID verification, case decisions, and payments. “Our system has a single system of records,” said Helene. “Our intent is to create the least amount of friction and the most dignity for those that are interacting with applications in the system.” Beam said it allows applicants to receive funds by bank account, a prepaid card, or online services like Zelle to serve communities equitably. Beam says it has helped process over $180 million to about 300,000 households. The company currently has operations in 16 states with 57 governments.

Bahama homes were purchased with FTX corporate funds • ZebethMedia

A new bankruptcy filing, first reported by CNBC, shows that FTX’s corporate funds were used to purchase homes in the Bahamas among other personal items. The details arise less than a week after the now infamous crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy – a decision that founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried said he regrets. FTX’s new CEO, Enron wind-down veteran John J. Ray III, said in the filing that he never in his career had “seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.” “From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented,” Ray said in the filing. The document states that corporate funds of the FTX group were used to purchase homes and other personal items for employees and advisors. Ray added that “certain real estate” was recorded in the personal names of employees and advisors, and “there does not appear to be documentation for certain of these transactions as loans.” The newly-installed chief executive makes it clear that he’s not blaming all FTX employees for the potential mishandling of funds. “Although the investigation has only begun and must run its course, it is my view based on the information obtained to date, that many of the employees of the FTX Group, including some of its senior executives, were not aware of the shortfalls or potential commingling digital assets.” If that possible lack of blame extends to the real estate transactions is not clear. He adds that current and former employees are some of the people most hurt by FTX, and that “these are many of the same people whose work will be necessary to ensure the maximization of value for all stakeholders going forward.” FTX’s downfall began last week after Binance backed out of a deal to acquire the crypto exchange as a result of a due diligence process. News reports that FTX was mishandling funds and under investigation soon bloomed into the company filing for bankruptcy. Bankman-Fried, meanwhile, claims that he is still hoping to raise a $8 billion lifeline for the company. “Everyone goes around pretending that perception reflects reality, it doesn’t,” Bankman-Fried said in a Twitter conversation with Vox reporter Kelsey Piper earlier this week. “Some of this decade’s greatest heroes will never be known, and some of its most beloved people are basically shams.”

Qualcomm debuts latest flagship Snapdragon chip and a new AI platform • ZebethMedia

It’s that time of year again. It can drop 20 degrees on any given day, and we’re stuck indoors watching people watch Qualcomm announce new chips and reference designs in sunny Hawaii. The Snapdragon Summit is the component-maker’s annual opportunity to map out its big plans for the next year, ahead of the holiday scrum and product deluge of CES and MWC. It’s an ideal time to pepper the industry with some timeline news items. Many of the major manufacturers are effectively finished announcing hardware for the year, and things won’t really ramp up for another couple of months. The big news is, naturally, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. That’s the chip that’s going to power a majority of your flagship Android handsets next year — at least until the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 2 presumably starts rolling out at some point mid-2023. It’s likely not surprising for those who have been following the space for the last several years that Qualcomm is positioning AI/ML as the centerpiece of its latest system on a chip. With the new Hexagon Processor (that’s a Qualcomm trademark, mind) at its center, the new system on a chip promises up to 4.35x gains for things like natural language processing. “This is thanks to the industry’s only Micro Tile Inferencing technique so we can power features like real-time multi-language translation,” the company writes. “In other words, you can speak into a language translator and have it translated into multiple languages running these complex networks.” Computational photography is the other big piece there. The system is able to recognize and segment different aspects of an image before the photo is taken. It uses a portrait as an example — breaking up hair, clothes, the background and a face into different segments. It’s a feature that will no doubt be present in imaging products like Portrait mode, in which depth sensing is important. The first devices with Gen 2 are set to arrive before the end of the year. The list of phone makers signed up for the SoC includes ASUS, HONOR, iQOO, Motorola, nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, REDMAGIC, Redmi, SHARP, Sony Corporation, vivo, Xiaomi, XINGJI/MEIZU and ZTE. Image Credits: Qualcomm Also of note this week is the arrival of Qualcomm’s new augmented reality chip, the Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1. The component is designed to power a new generation of slim AR wearables. It’s a low-power solution that sits across different parts of the glasses in order to better distribute its weight. “We built Snapdragon AR2 to address the unique challenges of headworn AR and provide industry-leading processing, AI and connectivity that can fit inside a stylish form factor,” Qualcomm’s Hugo Swart said in a release. “With the technical and physical requirements for VR/MR and AR diverging, Snapdragon AR2 represents another metaverse-defining platform in our XR portfolio to help our OEM partners revolutionize AR glasses.” The list of manufacturers developing hardware with the platform includes Lenovo, LG, Nreal, OPPO, Pico, QONOQ, Rokid, Sharp, TCL, Vuzix and Xiaomi.

BrightDrop is tracking $1 billion revenue in 2023 • ZebethMedia

General Motors’ e-delivery van subsidiary BrightDrop said Thursday it’s on track to reach $1 billion in revenue next year. The company, which launched in 2021 and was incubated at the automaker’s global innovation center, said reaching the financial milestone would make it one of the quickest tech startups to reach unicorn status, ahead of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Tesla, which took five or more years to reach their first billion. BrightDrop also unveiled Thursday at GM’s Investor Day BrightDrop Core, a subscription-based software platform that combines data generated from its other products to provide customers with more detailed insight into their operations. The platform will launch early next year to feature a user portal and mobile productivity apps. The company reported that it has received more than 25,000 reservations and letters of intent from customers including Walmart, Hertz, FedEx and Verizon for its Zevo 600 all-electric commercial van, which is already on the road. The company said that it’s set to generate up to $10 billion in revenue and reach profit margins of 20% by the end of the decade. Travis Katz, BrightDrop president and CEO, said that BrightDrop’s recent expansion into the online grocery sector will help it capture “substantial market share across multiple industries.” “We’re a tech startup with a subscription-based product offering that’s backed by a global powerhouse — this puts us in a league of our own,” Katz said in a statement.

Scene Report: Boston • ZebethMedia

What surprised me most on returning to Boston* for the first time since the onset of the pandemic was just how clustered things are. I’m not a great scheduler and I don’t know the city’s geography particularly well, but after two days spent meeting with more than a dozen startups, it slowly dawned on me that I was mostly operating within a five- to ten-block radius a stone’s throw from MIT (and, for that matter, Harvard). I’d given myself a little breathing room between meetings and site visits on Friday and was able to walk to all my meetings (the unseasonably warm weather didn’t hurt) — passing several of the spots I’d visited for conversations two days prior. Much like Pittsburgh, Boston has a tight-knit startup community. As companies get bigger, they’ll move to places like Waltham and Bedford on the outskirts, but they’ll remain part of this community nonetheless. There are several reasons I can see, as an outsider with only passing familiarity: It’s less sprawling than a place like the Bay Area/Silicon Valley or New York. The startups are often the outgrowth of universities (MIT, Harvard, Northeastern, BU), and there’s a built-in camaraderie there. Most people have worked at iRobot at some point. That last one’s diversifying a bit. Big corporations like Amazon (which may soon absorb iRobot) and Google have moved in as well. But the fact remains that most people aren’t ready to launch a startup right out of college, and these sorts of bigger corporations can be a good place to establish yourself and get a lay of the land. (Though universities are now doing an increasingly good job providing startup resources and accelerating companies after graduation.) Much like my own industry, everyone sort of knows everyone else, whether personally or by reputation. The longer you stay in a relatively insular industry, the more you’ll find yourself working with the same people time and again, so definitely try not to be an asshole (good advice generally, but doubly so when there can be clear and immediate consequences). You’re going to cross paths with the same people over and over. Life is funny like that. *I had drinks with a friend on Friday who helpfully noted that not every local is thrilled at the idea of using Boston, Cambridge, Somerville and the like interchangeably. So I’m going to just have to ask forgiveness rather than permission as I attempt to get this newsletter out in a timely fashion. I understand the importance of regional distinctions, as someone who has spent the majority of his life living in both the San Francisco Bay Area and two New York City boroughs, but for the sake of expediency in a very long newsletter, let’s assume all mentions of Boston are a reference to the city’s greater metropolitan area. World’s widest cable stayed bridge crossing the Charles River. Completed 2002. Image Credits: Getty Images / John Coletti This struck me the first time ZebethMedia did a small dinner ahead of our first Robotics event. Everyone knew everyone else. And most of them had been through the ranks of iRobot at one point or another. It’s not quite the Willow Garage story, but it’s another very clear case of a hub with a lot of important spokes. It also points to — as numerous people rightfully reminded me over the past week — the fact that we’re still very much in the early days of robotics. It feels like a small community because it is one, in a lot of ways. That’s exciting. I’ve spent much of my life feeling like I was a bit lately to different parties, but robotics feels new and fresh because it is. Some folks point to the home-brewed computer revolution that pulled in Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as a helpful way to contextualize where we are on the timeline. Others (like Tye Brady below) point significantly further back. I don’t think there’s a direct analog, but I do believe that 15 or 20 years from now, people will fondly remember this as a golden age for robotic discovery. The energy is palpable when you visit these sites. Much of Silicon Valley has spent the last decade trying to reengineer the same handful of tired apps over and over again (that’s not to say it’s all bad, but there’s a kind of stasis that comes with maturity). Here, however, you can talk to a million people chasing down real-world problems. The speed and excitement at which many of these breakthroughs occur can be head spinning. Of course, it’s important to remember that they’re standing on the backs of decades of research. Practically every technical founder has some university professor they’ll happily tell you is one of the great unsung heroes of robotics and AI. This, I think, is a big part of the reason why many robotics firms have set up a kind of miniature museum near the building’s entrance. It serves to show how far you’ve come, while providing a tangible connection to where you came from. Many of the products found on these shelves are a jumble of hastily soldered wires and 3D-printed parts. They’re the results of the excitement that drives people to build things with their hands in an effort to prove out whiteboarded theses. You want to bottle that jolt of electricity you get from the first time a scrappy bit of hardware works as intended and mete it out in those times when businesses become a hard slog and you lose sight of that original vision. Image Credits: Rise Robotics I should add here that pivoting doesn’t necessarily qualify as losing sight. It’s extremely common in robotics. You set out to solve a specific problem and find yourself suddenly deeply immersed in another thing entirely. A prime example of that from last week is the team at Rise Robotics, which started life as an exosuit company and is now making massive actuators for heavy machinery. Perhaps the most

Everything we know about the 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 6 EV • ZebethMedia

The EV was announced in June, but details have been sparse Hyundai released fresh details Thursday at the LA Auto Show about the 2023 Ioniq 6, the all-electric vehicle that the Korean company debuted in June. With an estimated range of 340 miles and an on-sale date in spring of 2023, the hotly anticipated follow-up to the Ioniq 5 crossover is one more step towards the company’s aim to accelerate electrification and autonomous vehicle technology in the U.S. by 2025. Hyundai has put considerable capital towards its target. The company recently announced a $10 billion dollar-plus investment into autonomous vehicles, EVs and robotics to help it meet its goals. Ioniq 6 platform The Ioniq 6 sits on Hyundai’s E-GMP platform, which also underpins the Ioniq 5 and the battery-electric vehicles under the Hyundai brand, including the Kia EV6 and the Genesis GV60. Hyundai has been touting the Hyundai Ioniq 6 as a Tesla Model 3 rival. By 2030, the company says it plans to introduce 17 battery-electric models and sell more than 1.8 million EVs worldwide. Power and speed Image Credits: Hyundai The Ionic 6 has a long and low roofline and slight boattail shape that gives it what Hyundai claims is an “ultra low drag coefficient.” Paired with a 77.4 kWh battery pack, the Ioniq 6 will come in front-wheel drive or optional all-wheel-drive and get a range of up to 340 miles. The all-wheel drive version will make 320 horsepower and 446 pound-feet of torque from a pair of dual motors located at the front and back of the car. Hyundai says that the Ioniq 6 can travel from zero to 60 miles per hour in under 5 seconds but customers will give up range for performance. The Ioniq 6 with all-wheel drive will get around 310 miles of range. The front-wheel drive version makes 225 horsepower and 258 lb-ft of torque and will get the touted 340 miles of range. Battery and charging Image Credits: Hyundai Both versions of the Ioniq 6 will get fast-charging capabilities and support both 400-volt and 800-volt infrastructure thanks to the EGM-P platform. That platform offers 800-volt charging as standard, but Hyundai says that it can accept 400-volt charging without an adapter by using an inverter and a motor to boost 400 volts to 800 volts. On a DC Fast charger (350-kW) Hyundai says that the Ioniq 6 can go from 10% to 80% charged in just 18 minutes. In five minutes, the Ioniq 6 can regain around 65 miles of range on a 350-kw DC Fast charger. For home charging, a Level 2 charger will give the Ioniq 6 a full charge in just over seven hours. Like other automakers, including Tesla, Hyundai has incorporated a battery conditioning software into the Ioniq 6. Conditioning can reduce charging time for quick charges on road trips. When a charging location is entered into the navigation system, the battery conditioning system will turn on so that the battery is prepped to take the max charge in the shortest period of time. The Ioniq 6 will also get a new navigation function that will generate routes with EV charging stations along the way when the battery is low. If a charging station is out of order or in use, the system will automatically look for other EV stations that are available and send the driver there. IONIQ 6 is the first Hyundai model to get OTA updates and V2L or vehicle-to-load functions (aka bi-directional charging). Hyundai says that the IONIQ 6 can charge electric devices like electric bikes, scooters, camping equipment, or a stranded EV. Like all Hyundais, the Ioniq 6 will come with a variety of the company’s Advanced Driver Assistance features, including forward collision warning and avoidance, pedestrian and cyclist avoidance assistance, lane departure warning, blind spot warning, and adaptive cruise control, amongst others. Hyundai has not yet announced pricing for the Ioniq 6 and says those details will be announced closer to the on-sale date in spring 2023.

Plaid names former Meta exec as its new payments head • ZebethMedia

Plaid today announced that it has named Meta veteran John Anderson to serve as its new head of payments. The fintech startup has slowly been evolving its offerings beyond its core product of account linking. Earlier this year, it moved into identity and income verification. Payments feels like a natural evolution of its business.  In an interview with ZebethMedia, Anderson explained that while Plaid will be personally facilitating payments through its Transfer offering, it will also continue working with its dozens of payments partners, which include the likes of Square, Stripe, Marqeta, Gusto and Silicon Valley Bank. Its end goal is to generally give consumers more choice when it comes to bank payments. “There has been so much innovation on POS [point of sale] in the last 10 years, but purely digital — no physical interaction — experiences for payments is still nascent,” he said. “This is where we are focused.” In its own way, Anderson pointed out, Plaid has been involved in digital payments for years, by enabling nearly a billion ACH transactions for things like account funding and account-to-account transfers. Along the way, the company partnered with nearly 50 payments companies. In other words, Plaid has its services for clients that range from account verification to risk assessment and processing. It also has built its data products to be modular with the goal of “maximizing choice” for its customers and “ultimately expanding the use of bank payments.” “This time last year, same-day ACH grew by nearly 75% year over year with numbers in the trillions — that’s a lot of growth for an already sizable number,” Anderson said. “There is a lot of market for many players and overall Plaid works with a broad network of payment partners. We plan to invest — not shift — in that ecosystem and strategy.” So generally, when it comes to payments, Anderson said, Plaid is focused on building products that help companies have “more cost-effective, efficient and flexible bank payments.” “Much of that work is through our partners as we ultimately want to maximize choice for consumers and businesses,” he said. “This is why we take an ecosystem approach to payments. It is not an us versus them, but instead a ‘we’ working together to innovate and create better infrastructure that is safer, smarter and faster for all participants.” As mentioned, among Plaid’s payments partners is frenemy Stripe, which in May unveiled a new product of its own. Specifically, Stripe’s Financial Connections was designed to give that company’s customers a way to connect directly to their customers’ bank accounts, to access financial data to speed up or run certain kinds of transactions — exactly what Plaid has done historically. In working with its payment partners over the years, Anderson said that Plaid saw a consistent challenge — that it usually took several days for an ACH transfer to complete. “That’s because it provides settlement time to cover assessing returns and fraud,” he said. “But that speed of transfer is very limiting to many of our customers — if you’re someone like Robinhood who wants to be able to have customers fund their account instantly and immediately start trading, 2-3 days ACH clearing time feels like a lifetime.” Trying to solve that challenge led to the genesis of Plaid’s Signal offering, which uses machine learning to analyze more than 1,000 risk factors and provide scores and insights that Plaid says provide “more certainty that a transaction will settle,” so a company can accelerate access to those funds without increasing risk. “We wanted to use intelligent data signals to be able to identify low-risk ACH funding events that can clear immediately,” he said. “By accurately predicting risk and fraud, we can help companies build much more real-time funding solutions so their consumers can get going on their financial goals immediately.  Signal today is moving out of beta, during which Robinhood was a pilot customer. In addition to Robinhood, fintechs like WeBull and Uphold have incorporated Signal into their risk models “to unlock instant ACH,” Anderson said. “We currently de-risk nearly 3 million transactions valued at nearly $1.5 billion each month,” he said. “We’re excited to offer this service to more customers and empower them to expand the applicability of ACH-based bank payments and transfers more safely and securely.” Looking ahead, he said, Plaid is actively building and partnering on real-time payment rails.  Plaid’s RTP and FedNow products are designed to help drive further adoption of bank payments, Anderson said, “not only because of the speed and certainty of settlement, but also through further innovation across the financial and payment ecosystem.” “We want to unlock the next phase of bank payments with a focus on a great consumer experience, adapting Signal for emerging risk and fraud vectors, and other activities that will accelerate the adoption of real-time payments in the U.S. through our payment partners and customers,” Anderson said. Also, in an interview with ZebethMedia, Anderson explained his decision to join Plaid. The executive left Meta in March after a 10-year stint that included him serving as that company’s head of payments and commerce. Anderson said he was drawn to the space because simply, “finances are at the heart of everyone’s lives.” Acknowledging that the “world is increasing in inequity,” the executive described financial access as an “uneven playing field getting ever more bumpy.” “Across so many of this amazing generation of new financial services, the common thread is Plaid is there in the background helping them build secure data accessibility, fast payments and managing risk and compliance,” he said. It’s not Anderson’s first foray into fintech. He developed a fintech app called GroupCard that went on to be acquired by InComm, a $13 billion prepaid and payments technology company. He also at one time worked in payments at eBay. “As a developer of an early fintech app, I experienced firsthand the challenges that many of Plaid’s customers face today,” he said. “On a very personal level, I came to Plaid because I

Ghost Robotics fires back against ‘baseless’ Boston Dynamics lawsuit • ZebethMedia

A legal dispute over robotic patents is devolving into a war of words, as Ghost Robotics fires back against Boston Dynamics. The Philadelphia firm calls the suit both “obstructive and baseless” in a statement sent to ZebethMedia. It notes, in part, Ghost Robotics’ success has not gone unnoticed by Boston Dynamics. Rather than compete on a level playing field, the company chose to file an obstructive and baseless lawsuit on November 11th in an attempt to halt the newcomer’s progress. Boston Dynamics is drawing on their considerably larger resources to litigate instead of innovate. Ghost’s statement, in which it refers to itself as “the number one supplier of legged robots to US and Allied Governments,” follows press reports of a lengthy suit filed by Boston Dynamics in a Delaware court. It adds that the company has its roots in its own legged robotic research, writing, “Ghost Robotics was born out of the PhD research of CTO Avik De and CEO Gavin Kenneally, under the tutelage of the esteemed Prof. Dan Koditschek at The University of Pennsylvania. Prof. Koditschek is a pioneer in the field of legged robots and holds the patent (jointly with his former students, Martin Buehler and Uluc Saranli) for the first battery-powered, dynamic legged robot, RHex (US6481513B2, filed March 14, 2001).” On Tuesday, Spot’s maker told ZebethMedia that it doesn’t comment on pending lawsuits, but added, Innovation is the lifeblood of Boston Dynamics, and our roboticists have successfully filed approximately 500 patents and patent applications worldwide. We welcome competition in the emerging mobile robotics market, but we expect all companies to respect intellectual property rights, and we will take action when those rights are violated. In the suit, Boston Dynamics cites multiple letters, including cease and desists, calling on Ghost to suspend the manufacture of its own four-legged dog robots over several alleged patent violations. It’s not the first time to two companies have butted heads. Ghost made national headlines after images surfaced of one of its dog robots sporting a SWORD Defense Systems Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle (SPUR). A drawing from Boston Dynamics’ suit The company’s then-CEO Jiren Parikh (who passed away in March of this year) told ZebethMedia at the time, We don’t make the payloads. Are we going to promote and advertise any of these weapon systems? Probably not. That’s a tough one to answer. Because we’re selling to the military, we don’t know what they do with them. We’re not going to dictate to our government customers how they use the robots. We do draw the line on where they’re sold. We only sell to U.S. and allied governments. We don’t even sell our robots to enterprise customers in adversarial markets. We get lots of inquiries about our robots in Russia and China. We don’t ship there, even for our enterprise customers. Last month Boston Dynamics joined a number of follow robotics firms in an open letter condemning the practice of weaponizing robotics. The letter notes, in part, We believe that adding weapons to robots that are remotely or autonomously operated, widely available to the public, and capable of navigating to previously inaccessible locations where people live and work, raises new risks of harm and serious ethical issues. Weaponized applications of these newly-capable robots will also harm public trust in the technology in ways that damage the tremendous benefits they will bring to society. Boston Dynamics is seeking unspecified damages in its suit.

Sateliot’s $11.4M Series A deck • ZebethMedia

You know what really sucks? Your IoT devices not being able to phone home. Rarely a problem when you’re in the center of a well-populated urban center with oodles of cell towers, but think of that water temperature buoy floating around in the Atlantic, an autonomous drone flying above the rain forest or a glacier-creep measuring sonde high up in the mountains. The fact is that about 90% of the planet has no cell coverage at all, and Sateliot raised a €10 million ($11.4 million) round of funding to change that. The company shared its pitch deck with us to take a deeper look, and so we will! Here’s the good and the bad of this high-flying space deck. We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that.  Slides in this deck Sateliot’s deck consists of 18 slides and is almost as pitched; the company redacted some of the info that goes into depth about how its tech works. Cover slide “90% of the world has no cellular coverage” — problem slide Team slide “To connect all NB-IOT devices from space under 5G standard” — solution slide “Near real-time connectivity” — value proposition slide “Standard protocol” — product slide “Sateliot is the #1 satellite operator” — “why us?” slide Market size slide Competition slide  Business model slide  “MNOs engaged and technical integrations ongoing” — traction slide  “Early adopters program” — go-to-market slide  Interstitial slide  Benefit slide  Progress slide  NGO program slide  Slogan slide  Closing slide Three things to love It’s always interesting to see companies that are trying to have an enormous impact on the space they operate in. Sateliot is making space for an incredible opportunity, essentially removing the need for infrastructure to make IoT solutions work from pretty much anywhere in the world with a clear view of the sky. It’s a story that could be told in so many ways, and I was excited to see how the company launched into things. Clear vision of the opportunity [Slide 2] Crisp and easy. Image Credits: SateliotI love a deck that very clearly states the problem it is solving, especially if it’s also able to highlight the advantage of solving that problem. Sateliot does that fantastically on its second slide — 90% of the world has no cell coverage, and this company is promising to change that. There’s not an investor in the world that won’t be able to see the benefit and financial potential of that. As a startup, if you can distill your problem, solution and opportunity this elegantly, you’ve got yourself a great launchpad to start weaving your narrative for your pitch. “Why us?” This is why… [Slide 7] Being the right team for the job is a crucial aspect of pitching. This is hella compelling. Image Credits: Sateliot If you have some reason why nobody else can truly solve the problem as well as you can, shout about it. It makes you a far more tempting investment target. One of the big questions an investor will be asking themselves is whether a particular company is well positioned to take charge of a market. In other words: Is there something about this team or company that gives them an unfair advantage over the competitors? This slide is labeled as “value proposition,” which is a little confusing. The slide doesn’t describe a value prop but a competitive advantage. It describes the “number of contributions to the 3GPP Standard,” but it doesn’t say what that means. Wikipedia has an answer that seems to indicate that this is very relevant, but I’d love for the company to have contextualized it on this slide. Those caveats aside: If it turns out that contributions to the standard are directly relevant to the company’s success and show that it’s particularly well positioned to corner this market, this absolute design disaster and word soup of a slide might actually be a powerful storytelling device. Scanning down the lists of companies that have made more and fewer contributions, there are a lot of big-name vendors. Seeing Sateliot in the top 25 or so — ahead of many other well-known companies — could suggest that there’s a significant moat in place. I wish the company had connected the dots for me, but if this slide means what I suspect it means, it makes up for the distinctly subpar “team” slide (which we’ll discuss in a bit). As a startup, what you can learn here is that if you have a moat, or some reason why nobody else can truly solve the problem at hand as well as you can, shout about it loudly — it makes you a far more tempting investment target. Strong social mission [Slide 14] Having a social mission component can help give investors the warm-and-fuzzies. Image Credits: SateliotSome investors have a social responsibility mandate as part of their investment theses. That could go in your favor if your company is in alignment with doing good in addition to doing well. But what is also true is that all investors are human beings, and it can never harm to have a heart-forward aspect to your story. Sateliot explains that once its satellites are up and running, there is almost no marginal cost to being able to offer its services to certain customer groups. In other words: If you want to GPS-track rhinos, you can do so for almost no money. As I said, that doesn’t matter to all investors, but in this case, you’re creating a win-win. Zero marginal cost means that there’s no real downside to offering the company’s services to causes that improve the planet and plenty of potential upsides. In addition to making the world a better place, there are PR opportunities, ESG advantages and secondary benefits to the company. Sateliot could very easily not have included this in its story, but it makes me happier that they did. The lesson here is

Discord users can now link their Crunchyroll accounts • ZebethMedia

Anime streaming service Crunchyroll has partnered with Discord. Starting today, users will be able to display the movie or TV show they’re currently watching on their Discord profile. Crunchyroll is the latest media company to add “Rich Presence,” the “Now Playing” functionality that automatically displays the video you’re watching, the game you’re playing, the song you’re listening to, etc. Discord users can also link their accounts for Reddit, Steam, TikTok, Twitter, Spotify, Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, PlayStation Network and Xbox, among others. The new integration is rolling out to users throughout the day in over 200 countries and territories. Note that some regional content restrictions will apply since Crunchyroll isn’t available in Japan and has a limited streaming library in some parts of Asia. To link accounts, Crunchyroll subscribers go to Discord on the web or desktop app, navigate to “User Settings,” click “Connections,” and select the Crunchyroll logo. It will be available on mobile devices soon, a Crunchyroll spokesperson told ZebethMedia. Once Rich Presence is enabled, the anime title you’re watching will appear as a small icon with an image of the series, the season and the episode. Users can watch along with their friends directly from their profile pop-out. There’s also a button directing users to the anime streaming service. “Anime is an adventure, and Crunchyroll’s Rich Presence on Discord will allow our fans to take their journey together,” said Kaliel Roberts, Chief Product Officer, Crunchyroll, in the announcement. “The Crunchyroll community loves to share their favorite anime with their friends, and now on Discord, fans have another avenue to celebrate their favorite series, discover new shows, and build deeper connections through the content they love.” Crunchyroll launched its official Discord server last month, which it uses to announce new events and activations. On November 2, Crunchyroll subscribers received a one-month code for Discord Nitro, a monthly subscription service that unlocks various perks like custom emojis and stickers, HD video streaming and more. Similarly, Discord Nitro users were offered one month of Crunchyroll’s $9.99/month subscription, “Mega Fan.” Crunchyroll has a free ad-supported plan and three paid tiers.

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