Tag: boston

Posted on

Here’s everything you missed at TC Sessions: Robotics 2022

In case you missed it, robots took over TechCrunch on Thursday, July 21. On that day, we played host to the robotic industry’s leading startups, researchers, and academics at TC Sessions: Robotics. The event was a blockbuster success, and we hope you enjoyed the show. All the features, panels, interviews and podcasts are embedded below.

TechCrunch Editor Brian Heater organized and hosted the event. Subscribe to his robotics newsletter, Actuator. It’s like a robotics conference in your inbox every week.

US Labor Secretary Marty Walsh on automation and unionization

U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh was a slam dunk for the event. In addition to having a background as a union organizer, he’s a Boston native, who served as the city’s mayor for six years before being tapped by Joe Biden for a cabinet position in March 2021.

Walsh’s take on automation is pragmatic, noting, “I’ve been in politics for 25 years, and for 25 years, we’ve been talking about automation replacing people.”

He adds, “We were forward-looking in the city of Boston. Innovation does bring different kinds of jobs. How do we make sure people are skilled and trained up to actually be able to access those jobs. If you don’t do that, then obviously it’s going to have an impact on people.”

This gets to an important and nuanced point in the automation conversation. While there’s consensus among many that — in the long run — technology will continue to create more and better jobs, what happens to blue-collar workers in the short term? How can we support and, perhaps, train them to be better prepared for the future? And who, ultimately, does that responsibility fall on?

READ MORE HERE.

Robotics scene continues to be bullish, but layoffs are looming

This startup season is filled with goals of profitability, promises of higher margins and whispers about pivoting toward sustainability. So when it comes to robotics, a capital-intensive sector that has a longer sales time horizon and loads of infrastructure hurdles, tensions feel inevitable.

Or at least, you’d think. Crunchbase data shows that, despite a creaky market, venture funding for robotics startups remains strong. It’s a dissonance worth exploring, so that’s exactly what we did at TC Sessions: Robotics 2022 with investors Kelly Chen, partner at DCVC, Bruce Leak, founder of Playground Global and Helen H. Liang, founder of FoundersX Ventures. The trio of investors spoke about how the ambitious sector is surpassing some of the downturn’s harshest symptoms.

The answer includes a shift in investment strategy and Amazon.

READ MORE HERE.

Are universities doing enough to foster robotics startups?

A few years ago, I got in the habit of asking researchers the titular question: Are universities doing enough to foster robotics startups? To a one, the answer was invariably, “no.” It was a massive blindspot for some of the world’s leading research institutes, both in commercializing their own work and giving their best and brightest a clearer path into the world of early-stage startups.

The disconnect is, perhaps, understandable. Academic researchers should, ultimately, be focused on the greater good of advancing science and technology. But the fact of the matter is that in our society, commercializing this work can often be the fastest way to move it from the laboratory to the real world.

READ MORE HERE.

Agility’s next Digit robot will have a face and hands

Digit, the bipedal robot developed by Agility Robotics, will continue to evolve and improve, including the addition of a head and some digits of its very own, according to co-founders Damion Shelton and Jonathan Hurst.

Just don’t expect Digit to talk or have digits that look like human hands.

Digit, which was introduced in 2019, initially seemed destined for a life in last-mile delivery. Recently, the startup that spun out of Oregon State University has shifted its focus to logistics. The aim: to turn Digit into a platform for general purpose work such as unpacking trucks and moving boxes around warehouses.

“Our whole vision with what Digit is, is as a platform that allows you to turn physical work into a software application,” said Shelton, during an interview and demo of Digit on Thursday at TC Sessions: Robotics.

READ MORE HERE.

The Amazon effect is fueling a wave of robotics investments, acquisitions and maybe an IPO

Amazon’s drive to get as many products to customers as quickly as possible combined with a decade of technological breakthroughs, a labor shortage and skyrocketing e-commerce growth have aligned to create ideal conditions for warehouse robotics startups.

This fruitful convergence has led to acquisitions, large funding rounds and at least one robotics IPO next year. And growth appears to be limitless, according to TC Sessions: Robotics panelists Locus Robotics CEO Rick Faulk, Berkshire Grey SVP Jessica Moran and Melonee Wise, who founded Fetch and is now VP of robotics automation at Zebra Technologies.

“Amazon really started rocking the boat, right?” said Moran during the panel on warehouse robotics. “The Amazon effect of get as many SKUs as possible to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, really put everybody in a position — even pre-COVID to say — ‘Hey, I gotta figure out how to automate how to do things faster.’”

READ MORE HERE.

Amazon defined warehouse robotics — so, what’s next?

It took exactly two minutes for today’s TC Sessions: Robotics fulfillment panel to make its first Amazon mention. The retail giant looms over the category like no other. It played a foundational role with the 2012 acquisition of Kiva Systems that birthed Amazon Robotics, and remains the 800-pound gorilla looming in the background of any conversation about warehouse automation.

For the past decade, the company has demonstrated an impressive dominance. It’s helped the company set a once-impossible standard of next-day — and even same-day — delivery for many orders. Retailers large and small have sought ways to remain competitive, fostering the growth of an entire industry of warehouse robotics firms like Locus, Fetch and Berkshire Gray.

READ MORE HERE.

UC Berkeley shows off accelerated learning that puts robots on their feet in minutes

Robots relying on AI to learn a new task generally require a laborious and repetitious training process. University of California, Berkeley researchers are attempting to simplify and shorten that with an innovative learning technique that has the robot filling in the gaps rather than starting from scratch.

The team shared several lines of work with TechCrunch to show at TC Sessions: Robotics today and in the video below you can hear about them — first from UC Berkeley researcher Stephen James.

READ MORE HERE.

Dean Kamen on the power of celebrating your own obsoletion

More than 40 years and 1,000 or so patents after selling his first company, AutoSyringe, to healthcare giant Baxter, Dean Kamen still gets a charge describing breakthrough innovation. It’s been five years since his organ fabricating project ARMI (Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute) divided critics.

The project made more waves early last month, at the CNN-hosted conference Life Itself. Kamen paints the picture appearing on a panel at TC Sessions: Robotics today.

READ MORE HERE.

Robotics and AI are going from cage to stage

A lot of promising companies come out of work by researchers at universities, or even grad students who have struck on some new innovation. But the transition from tech-focused research group to product-focused startup isn’t easy to make; fortunately three experts in the matter joined us at TC Sessions: Robotics to discuss a few ways to get through it successfully.

Milo Werner is a new general partner at MIT’s The Engine, an accelerator and fund focused on “tough tech.” Joyce Sidopoulos is a co-founder of MassRobotics, a community and advocacy group for the sector’s startup ecosystem. And Pieter Abbeel is a professor at UC Berkeley and the co-founder of Covariant, which is designing a new generation of warehouse robots (he also just won the ACM Prize — belated congratulations, Pieter).

READ MORE HERE.

Harmonizing human-robot interactions for a ‘new and weird’ world of work

Robots have always found it a challenge to work with people and vice versa. Two people on the cutting edge of improving that relationship joined us for TC Sessions: Robotics to talk about the present and future of human-robot interaction: Veo Robotics co-founder Clara Vu and Robust.ai founder Rod Brooks (formerly of iRobot and Rethink Robotics).

Part of the HRI challenge is that although we already have robotic systems that are highly capable, the worlds they operate in are still very narrowly defined. Clara said that as we move from “automation to autonomy” (a phrase she stressed she didn’t invent) we’re adding both capabilities and new levels of complexity.

READ MORE HERE.

The TechCrunch Live Podcast: Building Roboticists with Ayanna Howard and Ayah Bdeir

There’s never been a more exciting time to work in robotics. The pandemic changed the face of the industry from research to real world. Today we’ll be joined by two experts who will also serve as judges for the pitch-off at our upcoming robotics event. Ayanna Howard is the Dean of The Ohio State University College of Engineering. She’s worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and founded the Georgia Tech spinoff, Zyrobotics. Ayah Bdeir is the founder of STEM education kit LittleBits and is a Venture Partner at early stage investment firm, E14 Fund.

The TechCrunch Live Podcast: iRobot CEO talks, what else, robots

Colin Angle is the CEO and a co-founder of iRobots, and ahead of TechCrunch’s robotics event, he joined TechCrunch editor Brian Heater on a special Twitter Spaces. The conversation is great, and over the hour-long talk, tells a lot of never-before-heard stories of the early days of iRobot.

Posted on

Welcome to TC Sessions: Robotics 2022

Just over a month ago, I was standing onstage at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, delivering the opening remarks for TechCrunch’s first-ever climate event. It was a surreal moment that perfectly encapsulated the strange time warp we’ve both quickly and slowly been hurdling through over the past two-and-a-half years. It was the first time I’d been back in the venue since our last robotics event in March 2020.

TC Sessions: Robotics 2020 was a strange event for entirely different reasons. No one knew how long and difficult of a ride we were in for. We were still hopeful that stocking the venue with a few extra Purell kiosks would ward off the recently determined threat.

I was excited to be back onstage in Boston this year for the first time since our inaugural event, but the best laid plans have little bearing during a global pandemic. So, in lieu of delivering these words off a teleprompter as the morning audience files in, I’m instead typing them to you on TechCrunch. Maybe close your eyes for a moment and pretend you’re seated in a theater chair, inside a packed conference center hall, as a disarmingly handsome hardware editor gives you a little background on today’s event.

In spite of being entirely online, TC Sessions: Robotics 2022 is very much rooted in the city of Boston. This is partially a product of our initial programming and partially a response to having been in Berkeley for the previous four shows. I love Berkeley and can happily tell you a few great places around town to get a killer shawarma, but the East Coast broadly — and Boston, specifically — were long overdue for some TechCrunch love. In fact, I was planning to be back in town a few weeks ago, but had to stupidly go and catch COVID in Las Vegas.

Boston makes a strong case for the world’s greatest robotics city, thanks to the wildly disproportionate number of world-class universities. Like Pittsburgh, it’s done an increasingly good job of keeping startups in town, rather than fleeing to cities like San Francisco and New York.

It permeates today’s programming from MIT and Harvard researchers, to VC firms like E14, FoundersX Ventures and The Engine, collectives like MassRobotics and companies like Boston Dynamics, Berkshire Grey, Amazon Robotics and Veo. And, of course, we’re kicking things off with Boston’s former mayor turned Labor Secretary, Marty Walsh.

I’m extremely excited to finally be bringing this event to you, and am incredibly honored by all of the hard work my colleagues have invested to bring you this day-long event. The topics we’re discussing here today are more vital than ever, propelled by a pandemic that has accelerated robotics and automation from lab research to real-world technologies that will have an increasingly profound impact on our daily lives.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that we started dreaming up this event the moment we got off-stage in March 2020. I’m not thrilled that external forces meant it would take us this long to get here, but I’m hoping you’ll agree it was worth the wait.

Posted on

Arrenda emerges with Adelanta, a financing offering for landlords in Latin America

Arrenda, a Mexico City-based fintech company, is offering digital financial services to the real estate market of Latin America and closed on $26.5 million in a pre-seed round of equity and debt.

The funding round was a mix of $1.5 million in equity and $25 million in debt financing. Fasanara Capital led the investment and was joined by Kube Ventures, ODX, Toehold Ventures, Wharton Fintech, Lightspeed Venture Partners Scout Fund, PRMM Inmobiliaria and a group of angel investors.

Joe Merullo, founder and CEO, grew up in Boston and started his first business in real estate at 19 years old. He was recruited to June Homes, a startup in the proptech space that integrates technology into the residential real estate industry, specifically rentals. While there, he had the opportunity to work in Mexico, and the difficulty in finding a place to live gave him the idea for Arrenda.

The company, formerly known as ViveFácil, started in 2021 providing insurance, similar to a Jetty or Rhino, but for Mexico, Merullo told TechCrunch. That concept failed, but led Merullo and his team to credit. The company pivoted to Arrenda in 2022.

Its first service is Adelanta, a revenue-based financing offering that leverages Arrenda’s proprietary technology to enable landlords in Mexico to advance up to a year of future lease receivables in 24 hours or less.

Arrenda landlord lending Latin America

Arrenda’s smartphone app for landlord lending tool. Image Credits: Arrenda

Merullo believes this is a unique company within Mexico, which has 5.5 million renting households, and where traditional financial institutions are still the dominant place to go for credit. However, where he sees Arrenda differentiating itself is through its proprietary underwriting process that quickly provides financing terms.

“We’ve developed the risk model that enables us to gather data through various touch points, like bank accounts, credit bureaus, tax bureaus and criminal bureaus, to understand the risks associated with the financing, and then make a decision to give them credit based on this,” Merullo said. “We’ve combined that in turn with underwriting of the receivables that we find inside the lease contracts in order to make determinations in that 24-hour window.”

The company is pre-revenue and rolling out its website now with 900 people on its waitlist. It is signing financial contracts from $250 to $10,000 per month with an average financing amount of around $12,000 over a 10-month period.

Merullo plans to use the debt portion of the new funding for loans and financings issued. The equity will go toward adding to Arrenda’s 18-person employee base. The company has grown two people per month since February and is hiring more. He also plans to expand into more of the largest metropolitan hubs in Mexico and establish distribution channels with industry groups.

Up next, the company aims to reach $1 million in annual recurring revenue by the fourth quarter of this year. There are also plans to expand the financing offering into the commercial real estate space to landlords of warehouses, offices and shopping centers.

“We’ve got amazing feedback from these types of folks who are working on building the underwriting model to support these people right now,” Merullo said. “In addition to that, we’re going to be pursuing products for tenants. In 2023, we plan to roll out a number of products to help make rent easier for tenants as we originally did from the insurance side of things, for example, on ‘rent now pay later’ types of credit products.”

Convene uses landlord partnership model to outclass WeWork

Posted on

Security-as-code startup Jit comes out of stealth with $38.5M in seed funding

Jit, a startup that helps developers automate product security by codifying their security plans and workflows as code that can then be managed in a code repository like GitHub, today announced that it has raised a $38.5 million seed round led by boldstart ventures, with Insight Partners, Tiger Global, TeachAviv and a number of strategic angel investors also participating. The company was incubated by FXP, a Boston-Israel startup venture studio

With this announcement, Jit is also coming out of stealth and announcing the addition of former Puppet CTO and Cloud Foundry Foundation executive director Abby Kearns to its advisory board.

“Cybersecurity leaders are adding more tools, faster than their teams are able to implement, tune and configure them — increasing risk spend,” said Jit CTO David Melamed. “Creating a security plan or program is too time-consuming for high-velocity dev and product teams. Jit streamlines technical security for engineering teams over compliance checkboxes all while reducing spend. We deliver the simplest approach to implementing DevSecOps where product security is built into the software from the start along with a way to continuously maintain it in a language developers understand — code.”

Image Credits: Jit

The idea behind Jit is to offer what the company calls “minimal viable security” (MVS). Out of the box, the service offers developers MVS plans that have already codified a minimum set of tools and workflows that they’ll need to secure their apps and the infrastructure they run on.

“Instead of having to research, configure, implement and do the work to integrate open source security tools into your stacks and CI/CD pipelines, the security research team at Jit has taken the time to curate and select the tools that will provide the first line of defense for your applications, without having to figure it out yourself,” the company explains.

The company argues that its approach also means developers will only get alerts if there are important vulnerabilities they have to react to right away — and can then remediate them from inside their existing workflows. The tool will create automatic security reviews inside of pull requests or find AWS misconfigurations or issues with security controls for third-party services like npm-audit.

With this, the service can also make it easier for businesses to start their gap analysis for a number of compliance programs like SOC2 or ISO 27001 by giving them a dashboard that lays out their current status.

“With the rapid increase in the number of applications being developed and managed, product security needs to be simple and easy to use as code, as well as work within current CI/CD pipelines,” said Ed Sim, founder and managing partner at boldstart ventures. “Jit ensures that modern engineering teams can build secure cloud-based applications by design, all while simplifying continuous security. Jit is unique in that it unifies a variety of open source security tools while natively integrating the entire security as code experience into the current developer workflow.”

Image Credits: Jit

Posted on

Black Gen Z VCs are here and swinging for the fences

One day early in the pandemic, Dazayah Walker came across a job she’d never heard of before: venture capitalist investor.

The pandemic ensured she had time, and intrigued by the profession, she started teaching herself the trade. She soon realized it was a way to build wealth, and as a young Black woman, it was also a viable career path to which she was never exposed.

“This is one of those quietly kept industries where people have been becoming multimillionaires for years,” Walker told TechCrunch. “We just have not been included in that.”

That’s starting to change. Although the investor landscape remains mostly white and male, there has been an uptick in Black VCs striving to fund overlooked founders while simply pursuing a career once obscured from them. This new crop of VCs are starting younger than ever — and like Walker, they’ve set their sights high.

Walker studied economics at Spelman College and worked as an executive assistant at record label Quality Control. Two months after discovering venture capital, she pitched to start the label’s first VC fund. Today, at 24, she runs the label’s entire investment portfolio.

“There is a consistent need for fresh perspectives, new forms of creativity and innovation, and this is done through diversity and inclusion,” Walker said. “It’s an opportunity for [us] to be in a space to have an impact and inspire.”

Another way of looking at the world

Walker initially was worried that her lack of a Stanford degree or Bay Area expertise would hinder her progress, but the perspectives and ideas she brought to the table have helped her establish herself.

A black woman in a suit smiles to the camera

Quality Control VC, Dazayah Walker. Image Credits: Dazayah Walker

Atlanta, where Quality Control is based, is an emerging tech hub, and the label is one of the nation’s most popular. Walker says her young perspective is valued as the spending power of Gen Z grows.

She has leveraged the cultural relevance of Quality Control and its artists to build her network, knowing that founders and investors are always looking to associate themselves with whatever’s considered “cool.”

To date, Walker has helped the label execute eight deals, many focused on consumer apps and fintech, and spends time educating her favorite artists about investing. She once wanted to become a music executive but has shed those aspirations for a focus on opening economic opportunities for others who, like her, didn’t know this avenue to prosperity existed.

“There’s so much overlap in the intersection between music and technology,” Walker said. “I see the opportunity for this to be bigger than the now, but as a way to build generational wealth and define a legacy.”

Over in Los Angeles, Jonathan Moore, 22, left his Wall Street career to work as an analyst at TCG Capital Management. He pitched the idea for the firm to launch a crypto fund, believing the intersection of web3 and the creator economy could tap a generation of untapped talent. Since launching the fund in September 2021, he has closed over 20 deals and says the outlook for this year is equally promising.

Posted on

Notarize signs off on 25% staff reduction, admits challenging fundraising environment

Notarize, a startup that offers remote online notarization services, has let go of 110 people — or 25% of its workforce.

Doing the math, the 7-year-old, Boston-based company had about 440 employees before the staff reduction.

When the COVID-19 pandemic first began, demand for Notarize’s services, dubbed RON for short, skyrocketed as people were confined to their homes. This was especially true in the case of people purchasing, or refinancing homes — considering that at that time mortgage interest rates were at near-historic lows. Being able to get documents notarized “online, anywhere, anytime, with notaries available 24×7 by computer, tablet, or smartphone” was appealing to many.

But things have changed. Pandemic isolation is long over and with mortgage interest rates now surging to nearly 6% for a 30-year-loan, the housing market has slowed considerably.

In March of 2021, Notarize announced it had raised $130 million in a Series D funding round led by fintech-focused VC firm Canapi Ventures after experiencing 600% year-over-year revenue growth. The round valued Notarize at $760 million, which was triple its valuation at the time of its $35 million Series C in March of 2020.

It’s not the first time the company has had to go the layoff route. In 2019, Notarize saw “critical financing” fall through and had to lay off staff, according to CEO and founder Pat Kinsel.

Things picked up for the company after the pandemic hit and Kinsel worked to get appropriate legislation passed across the country to make it possible for more people in more states to get documents notarized digitally.

In a statement issued this week, Kinsel implied that being able to secure additional funding would be challenging:

Our regulatory victories and partnerships have put the company in a fundamentally different position over the past two years, and our strategy must evolve. We can no longer delay in addressing these issues. Additionally, the state of the economy and world events is creating a lot of uncertainty and putting significant pressure on businesses everywhere. While many of these factors propel Notarize’s business, they also change the company’s access to future investment and force us to re-evaluate what we can invest in and pursue. We have made the difficult decision to eliminate a significant number of roles across the organization in order to realign resources against our most critical goals. We have an incredible roster of current and future customers and partners, and we remain confident in the future of the company and the value we bring to both businesses and consumers. Choosing to part ways with deeply-valued employees was not a decision we made lightly, as we’re saying goodbye to colleagues who have done exceptional work to build this company and deliver on our mission for our customers.

He also addressed the move in this Twitter thread.

Posted on

JOKR leaving U.S., ‘for now,’ to focus on LatAm

On-demand food delivery company JOKR said it was shuttering its New York and Boston deliveries as of June 19 and leaving the U.S. market altogether, with co-founder and CEO Ralf Wenzel saying the startup is going to focus on Latin America.

“We have decided to stop our business activities in the U.S. for now, which have lately only accounted for about 5% of our business and with a very differently structured opportunity,” JOKR CEO Ralf Wenzel said in a statement. “Given our unique position in Latin America, we decided to increase our investments in the region organically and by exploring complementary inorganic opportunities, expand our geographic footprint and expand on our service offering to become the leading and most customer serving online grocery business across Latin America, a 1.2tn retail market with less than 10% online penetration.”

T​he New York and Boston operations accounted for nine micro-fulfillment centers out of JOKR’s network of approximately 200 worldwide, according to Bloomberg. The move will also cut about 50 workers from its 950-person office staff.

In JOKR’s one-year lifespan, it has taken in over $430 million, including a $260 million Series B round last November. At that time, the company said its valuation was $1.2 billion and touted itself as “one of the fastest companies to reach unicorn status in history.”

Perhaps it was a little too early for the company to toot its own “horn.” Even though JOKR hadn’t been in New York for that long, the news isn’t much of a surprise, actually, for a few reasons.

First, I spoke to Wenzel in April, and asked him about an Information story from February that discussed JOKR possibly selling its New York operations. At the time, Wenzel called it a rumor, telling me, “We’ve been operating in New York, and there’s no strategic shifts.”

However, he also hinted that the company was looking at its footprint in New York, saying, “In terms of looking into the warehouse distribution, we opened new warehouses and we closed other warehouses as we looked into what was the right location, what was the right proximity to different customers.”

While the company was mum on where, Wenzel’s comments implied that closings were likely ahead.

Even though some food delivery companies, like Buyk, Fridge No More and Zero Grocery folded earlier this year, It didn’t sound like things were that dire over at JOKR.

Wenzel said JOKR had been focused on “reinventing retail,” over the past 12 months, which entailed “how to especially disrupt the supply chain and procurement side of things.” When asked how that strategy was working out, Wenzel replied that things had been going so well that “we have now become fully gross profit positive on a group level for our local business across all of our countries after 12 months of operations.”

Second, as mentioned, food delivery companies are facing tough times as funding dried up and the rush to invest into this sector, partly as a result of the global pandemic, caused it to become quite inflated and due for a course-correct.

This became evident when some of JOKR’s competitors began announcing layoffs. For example, in May, Gopuff, Gorillas and Getir announced staff reductions. Zapp also had layoffs. TechCrunch took a deeper look at what was happening in the on-demand delivery space earlier this month and what it means for the industry going forward.

Perhaps faster delivery times were a poor choice from a unit-economics perspective

The delivery market is coming down from its pandemic highs

Posted on

Brown Foods ushers in new age of dairy, raises a ‘latte’ money for cowless cow’s milk

Cow’s milk continues to be a staple of human nutrition. Pediatricians recommend it for infant growth, and for the most part, it has more protein than alternative “milks.” However, this dairy delight isn’t tolerated by all people, and the process from cow to dinner table is a known strain on environmental resources.

Enter Brown Foods, a 1-year-old company developing its first product, UnReal Milk, which is “real” whole milk created using mammalian cell culture technology.

Sohail Gupta Brown Foods milk

Sohail Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Brown Foods Image Credits: Brown Foods

The founders, Sohail Gupta, Avhijeet Kapoor and Bhavna Tandon, have been friends since their undergraduate days at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Gupta has been a vegetarian throughout his life, and when his wife got pregnant, they were not able to find a milk alternative that was as nutritious to conventional dairy, that didn’t contribute further to climate change and that was cruelty-free to animals.

UnReal Milk is their answer to that problem. With a presence in Boston and India, Brown Foods is a Y Combinator Winter 2022 alum that touts being the first company in the U.S. to produce “real cow’s milk” in a laboratory, accomplishing the milestone in less than 3 months.

“We validated for the major macronutrients, the proteins, the fats and the carbs,” Gupta told TechCrunch. “We could see that the profiles for those were similar to milk at large-scale quantities, and as a result, we could say that we have a superior product from the lab.”

And, by using the cell-cultured approach, UnReal Milk can be similar in taste and texture to real milk, unlike plant-based alternatives. In addition, it can also be converted into typical dairy products, like butter, cheese and ice cream, and is nutritionally similar to cow’s milk. However, unlike conventional dairy, Brown Foods’ milk is estimated to have a 90% smaller carbon footprint.

Armed with the laboratory validation, the pre-revenue company moved forward with raising a seed round, and Thursday it announced $2.36 million from investors, including Y Combinator, AgFunder, SRI Capital, Amino Capital, Collaborative Fund and a group of individual angel investors like Kunal Shah.

Scaling is often an issue with cell-cultivated meat products, so time will tell if Brown Foods is able to jump that hurdle and have a viable product on the market in the next few years.

Gupta expects to start with a small scale-up in the next year. The majority of the funding will go toward those efforts: the bioprocess, scale-up and product development.

“The top-level roadmap of how we are thinking is doing some kind of sampling where we can actually get feedback and learn what things look like and then go toward the kinds of products we will have for commercialization,” he added.

Meanwhile, the global dairy alternatives market is forecasted to be a $50 billion business by 2028, and startups are flocking into this sector with various approaches like cell cultivation and plant-based beverages, all trying to disrupt a $468 billion conventional dairy market.

The dairy alternative market is expected to grow faster than conventional dairy during this decade, at 10% versus 3%, which has venture capital investors drinking it up. For example, Better Dairy raised $22 million earlier this year to create dairy-free cheese, while Miruku is leveraging molecular farming technology to create dairy proteins. At the same time, The EVERY Company, NotCo, Climax Foods and Perfect Day also have investor attention as they develop their animal-alternative cheese and dairy products.

Is cell-cultured meat ready for prime time?

Posted on

Synergies raises $12M to give factory managers an AI analytics assistant

There’s no lack of startups around the world trying to make industrial activities more efficient with artificial intelligence. Some invent robots to assist or replace manual labor, while others use machine learning to help businesses discover insights. Synergies Intelligent Systems falls into the second category.

Michael Chang founded Synergies in 2016 in Boston to provide easy-to-use AI-powered analytics tools to medium-sized manufacturers. Having worked at Foxconn in Shenzhen in the late 2000s helping the Apple supplier improve yield rate, or reduce the percentage of defective products, using data analysis, Chang realized that not every factory has the financial prowess to spend tens of thousands of dollars on digitization.

Synergies’ vision and recent growth have won investor support. The company was mostly bootstrapping during its early years, but it recently accepted venture funding to accelerate hiring, market expansion, and product development. It secured $12 million from a Series A funding round led by NGP Capital, which was formerly called Nokia Growth Partners and is backed by Nokia, as its name implies. Private equity firm New Future Capital also participated.

Synergies now operates a team of about 70 employees across Shanghai, Taipei, Guangzhou, Singapore and Boston.

The startup declined to disclose its valuation but said it’s serving nearly 100 customers, 80% of which are in Greater China, including mid-sized factories with thousands of workers run by Foxconn and Fuyao, one of the world’s largest auto glass producers. Chang told TechCrunch that Nokia and Synergies are working on some projects in the early stage, though the pair doesn’t have a large-scale partnership yet.

The Finnish telecoms titan, to Chang’s knowledge, has been promoting “industrial 5G” worldwide, which is to bring next-generation connectivity to manufacturing. So it won’t be surprising to see the two working more closely together in the future.

Synergies’ product could work well with 5G-powered factories that are constantly collecting and analyzing data in the cloud. It provides what’s called an “augmented analytics” platform to help manufacturers optimize efficiency on three fronts — supply chain, yield, and production capacity.

By analyzing operational data, Synergies’s software can make suggestions to managers, for example, recommending how much supply they should procure, or how to quickly change a product line to maximize capacity at the lowest cost. Once the advice is put into practice and new data is reaped, Synergies’ machine learning systems can analyze and keep refining its algorithms to help factories improve performance.

“Such machine learning isn’t rocket science for AI experts, but for an average small- and medium-sized factory in China, the overhead for creating a comprehensive ‘data middle platform’ is too high because it requires the coordination between the IT department, project managers, and AI experts,” suggested Chang, an MIT graduate with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science.

“Most small and medium factories only keep a small team of IT staff, not to mention a team of dedicated AI scientists.”

“Compared to advanced manufacturers in the West,” Chang continued. “Chinese factories, even the ones that are massive now, have only been around for four or five decades. They are a lot more price-sensitive, operate at lower margins, and want quicker returns on investment. So it’s hard to ask them to spend $10 million upfront on building a data platform.”

Using data analytics and AI to refine business decisions also addresses the problem of high turnover in the manufacturing industry, Chang explained. As population growth slows in China, factories are struggling to recruit and retain workers, meaning it’s hard to preserve workplace knowledge as well.

“It’s not a business that sees the kind of crazy growth as, say, crypto companies,” Chang maintained. “But I believe it’s a meaningful business because we are creating real changes on the ground.”

China’s Black Lake raises $77M to give factories a digital upgrade

Posted on

Rodney Brooks and Clara Vu will discuss human-robot interaction at TC Sessions: Robotics 2022

Robots have transformed automation across industries such as agtech, automotive, logistics, manufacturing and warehousing. Yet even the most advanced robots typically work in restricted workcells away from people due to safety concerns. 

The field of human-robot interaction (HRI) offers the potential for robots with enough cognitive smarts to work effectively and safely alongside humans in places such as factory floors. The rise of the collaborative robot — or cobot — is well underway, with a projected market value of $8 billion by 2030.

We’re thrilled to announce that two roboticists at the forefront of HRI — Rodney Brooks, Founder and CTO of Robust.AI (and co-inventor of Roomba, the popular household robot), along with Clara Vu, Co-founder and CTO of Veo Robotics — will join us on stage at at TC Sessions: Robotics 2022 on July 22 in Boston, Massachusetts.

Our conversation will cover the current state of HRI, the challenges of developing robots with “common sense,” and the technologies required for people and robots to work in close proximity. Of course, we’ll ask what they’re up to right now and what’s coming down the road.

We’ll also ask how long will it be before cobots become part of the everyday work environment. And what kind of training infrastructures do we need to create as more efficient cobots replace human workers in physically demanding or repetitive menial jobs?

Robotics legend Rodney Brooks founded Robust.AI in 2019 with a mission to build a first-of-its-kind industrial-grade cognitive platform for robots. The goal is to make robots that are smarter, safer, more robust, context-aware and collaborative. Such robots could function reliably in construction, eldercare, households and other highly complex environments.

In 2020, Robust.AI raised a $15 million Series A.

In addition to his roles at Robust.AI, Brooks, an award-winning computer scientist, taught and held directorships at MIT. He was also founder and CTO at Rethink Robotics and iRobot.

Veo Robotics, an industrial automation company founded in 2016, created FreeMove, a comprehensive 3D safeguarding system for industrial robots that powers dynamic human-robot collaboration. In other words, it turns run-of-the mill industrial robots into machines that respond to humans.

When human skill and creativity join forces with the strength and speed of robots, the result is a flexible human-robot interaction, which would help manufacturers adjust to continuous, rapidly changing market demands.

In 2019, the company raised a $15 million Series A.

As Veo Robotic’s co-founder and CTO, Clara Vu leads the engineering team and developments of the computer vision-powered sensing and intelligence used by four of the biggest industrial robot companies in the world: FANUC, Yaskawa, ABB and Kuka.

With more than two decades of robotics experience, Vu has developed multiple products from inception to market. She began her career at iRobot programming robots for oil well exploration; she then moved on to interactive toys and the Roomba. 

Prior to Veo, Vu was co-founder and director of software development for Harvest Automation, the makers of mobile robots for agricultural automation.

Don’t miss a fascinating conversation with Rodney Brooks and Clara Vu, two roboticists on the cutting edge of human-robot interaction, about the reality and potential of humans and robots working side-by-side.

TC Sessions: Robotics 2022 takes place in person on July 22 in Boston, Massachusetts. Buy your pass by Friday, June 24 at 11:59 pm (PT) and save $200.