Alchemist Accelerator has a new pile of AI-forward companies demoing their wares today, if you care to watch, and the program itself is making some international moves into Tokyo and Doha. Read on for our picks of the batch. Chatting with Alchemist CEO and founder Ravi Belani ahead of demo day (today at 10:30 a.m. […]
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U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The intense 12-week program is designed to get seed and Series A companies “investment ready,” the firm says, by providing specialist mentorship, networking opportunities and intensive […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The graduates of Alliance DAO are often useful indicators of investor appetite and user adaption trends within the crypto space. The latest batch of the stage-agnostic crypto accelerator, unveiled today, comes at a moment of great excitement for the recovering market.
Just two months ago, Bitcoin hit its all-time high; though the value of the largest cryptocurrency has since declined, it continues to trade at much higher levels than during the market downturn following FTX’s implosion in late 2022. Venture investors are responding and plowing money into web3 startups, sending total fundraising in the space to roughly $1.9 billion in Q1, a sharp 58% jump from the quarter before, according to Crunchbase data.
The renewed enthusiasm among web3 believers is evidenced by catchphrases like “we are so back” that have filled crypto X/Twitter. In the meantime, regulatory efforts to rein in the industry have not waned. In the U.S., Binance’s Canadian founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao is set to become the richest person to ever face imprisonment. Uniswap, which has been vocal about its decentralized approach to digital assets, received a notice from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last month.
Unsurprisingly, the ongoing crackdowns in the U.S. have a palpable impact on Alliance DAO’s geographic composition.
Image Credits: Alliance DAO
As shown in the graph (above) shared by Qiao Wang, one of the founding partners of Alliance DAO, founders based in North America accounted for 45% of the accelerator’s applicants in H2 2021; that share slipped to just 26% in H1 this year.
“Essentially, the U.S. is losing market share for crypto founders over the last three years. This is likely due to 1) regulations and 2) crypto finding product-market fit in emerging markets,” Wang told TechCrunch via email.
Indeed, the accelerator has seen a steady uptick in interest from Asia, which made up 24% of all applications in H1 2024, compared to 14% in H2 2021.
North America’s declining participation in Alliance DAO doesn’t imply founders simply abandon their crypto dreams. Historically, web3 entrepreneurs have been a flexible and nomadic tribe, fleeing crackdowns and seeking out more favorable regions. As a result, some of them may set up physical bases in emerging markets with a more amicable crypto environment.
As TechCrunch has reported, Asia has quickly become a popular destination for crypto entrepreneurs. The user base is large, young and open to new types of technology and financial assets. Several jurisdictions, including Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore, have taken notable steps to provide clearer regulatory frameworks for the budding sector, providing much reassurance to founders facing policy uncertainty elsewhere.
Alliance DAO’s latest cohort, the 12th edition of its three-month program, received 1,503 applications. That marked a significant increase from the last batch’s 1083 applications. Just 21 teams were accepted this time, resulting in a competitive 1.4% acceptance rate. Twelve of them are presenting at today’s demo day.
Projects building on Ethereum, the most active blockchain by developer activity, are still the focus of this cohort, although other ecosystems like Solana and Bitcoin are “making a comeback,” according to Wang. Popular verticals seen across the batch include decentralized AI, crypto infrastructure (especially modular blockchain), decentralized finance (DeFi), and crypto-based payment solutions.
Now, let’s turn to the projects:
Company name: Villcaso
What it does: Permissionless U.S. real estate investing
Founders: Nathaniel Sokoll-Ward, Val Lee
The pitch: REITs, or real estate investment trusts, are designed to offer investors fractional exposure to real estate, lowering barriers to entry. While they offer more liquidity than traditional property investment, REITs are for the most part inaccessible to global investors, who make up an increasing share of total real estate investments in the U.S. Using a “fully legal permissionless token,” Villcaso is working to scale and distribute fractional ownership of U.S. real estate to a global audience. It has small equity positions in a large number of homes across the country.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: GoBankless
What it does: Transferwise with stablecoins
Founders: Ygor Francisco, Khayalethu Mtshali
The pitch: GoBankless has its eye on Africa’s cross-border payments market that’s witnessing explosive growth. Businesses have been stuck with the long processing time and high settlement fees of traditional banks, while those that resist SWIFT’s monopoly are left facing counterparty risks in shadow markets. With the use of stablecoins, the startup is working to make cross-border payments instant without banking intermediaries. Today, GoBankless is serving around 50 small businesses across Mozambique and South Africa and settling $7 million in payments every month.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: Wasabi Protocol
What it does: Leverage trading protocol
Founders: Eren Derman, Kemal Hasan Atay
The pitch: Crypto trading, especially longtail trading of new assets such as memecoins and NFTs, has seen a surge in daily volume. Popular platforms like Aevo and Hyperliquid allow users to gain early access, but they are “dependent on the market being sufficiently liquid,” leading to missed opportunities. Wasabi solves liquidity by backing user positions with underlying assets while its competitors take an algorithmic approach. Launched a few months ago, Wasabi’s total value locked (TVL) has grown to $60 million with over $200 million in volume.
Stage: Recently closed a seed round; raising a strategic round
Company name: Lulubit
What it does: Coinbase for Central America
Founders: Ianir Sonis, Diego Hernan Cabrera, Alan Futerman
The pitch: Central America is among regions that have shown a rapid pace of crypto adoption. Nonetheless, it’s still hard to even just buy and sell crypto in the region. P2P networks are unreliable while established exchanges charge high fees. Lulubit allows retail users in Central America to buy and sell crypto from their local banks and spend through the crypto debit card it issues; users can also send remittances on-chain to Lulubit and withdraw to their bank accounts at lower rates than the traditional method. Launched less than a year ago, Lulubit has amassed more than 18,000 users and processed over $1.3 million in volume in April alone, growing 36% month-over-month.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: ZwapX
What it does: Marketplace for tokenized watches
Founders: Yohan Chiovetta, Noah Chiovetta, Rocco Di Capua
The pitch: The billion-dollar luxury watch market is enormous yet underserved by technological innovation. Peer-to-peer marketplaces are fraught with scams while B2C platforms face online authentication challenges. ZwapX offers a way for users to trade physical watches in the form of tokens, which act as certificates of ownership and authenticity. It has tokenized 44 watches to date with a $1.4 million TVL and a volume of $240,000.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: Fractal Payments
What it does: Cross-border payments for global businesses
Founders: Pavel Skalin
The pitch: Money movement for businesses is one of the world’s biggest industries, yet it’s still suffering from perennial problems like high fees and slow processing. Fractal Payments is another startup aspiring to disrupt SWIFT with the use of stablecoins. Fully licensed in the European Union, it claims to make cross-border payments three times cheaper and six times faster than through legacy banking rails. It has facilitated more than $5 million in payments volume and working with a network of partners that support payments in over 60 countries.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: Código
What it does: Crypto data for AI training
Founders: Jean-Philippe Emelie Marcos, Diego Besprosvan, Jaziel Guerrero
The pitch: Training data for AI is a billion-dollar market opportunity that has spawned unicorns like Scale AI. But existing solutions focus mostly on web2 use cases, with few powering AI training with crypto data. Código provides highly curated datasets to train specialized models for high-stake crypto applications, such as those involving financial transactions. Data is collected automatically through crowdsourcing, after which it is subject to a decentralized review and augmentation process where reviews can earn tokens. The tool has generated 4,000 dApps and four million lines of code within six months.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: Accrue
What it does: Stablecoin payment network for Africa
Founders: Clinton Mbah, Adesuwa Omoruyi
The pitch: Bank transfers in Africa are notoriously costly and slow. Accrue aims to create a payment network that enables instant and affordable transactions — all powered by stablecoins. To that end, the startup is tapping the continent’s existing network of mobile tellers, which allow users to perform bank transactions over mobile phones, often simply through text messages. “10% of these mobile tellers are stablecoin-savvy,” and they are joining Accrue because it offers them more profit share and an upcoming token. The startup is cash-flow positive and has processed $5 million in payments.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: Fig Investments
What it does: Tokenizing hedge fund strategies
Founders: Guanzhi Ma, Tony Qian
The pitch: The interest in decentralized finance (DeFi) services from traditional finance (TradFi) has surged, as seen in institutional players like Blackrock tokenizing stocks. Founded by banking veterans, Fig offers an automated trading desk that “matches TradFi interest in crypto with on-chain LP interest for returns.” It claims to be achieving a 10x scale than its competitor. Since launching four months ago, its TVL has grown to $10 million, with $40 million more in the backlog.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: 0G
What it does: Modular AI chain
Founders: Michael Heinrich, Ming Wu
The pitch: 0G is building in the red-hot and cut-throat area of modular blockchain, which aims to help scale Ethereum transactions. Specifically, 0G is acting as a data availability layer, which ensures nodes in a blockchain network can access and verify transaction data. Its focus puts it in direct competition with well-funded projects such as a16z-backed EigenLayer, industry leader Celestia as well as Avail, which originated from Polygon. Using its unique technology, 0G claims it can achieve performance that’s 50,000 times faster than Celestia while costing 100x less than the rival.
Stage: Recently closed a 20x oversubscribed pre-seed round; raising seed
Company name: Proto
What it does: Google Maps on-chain
Founders: Akshay Yeleswarapu
The pitch: Despite the ubiquitous use of Google Maps, the application is surprisingly inaccurate in developing countries where cities are much denser than their Western counterparts and urban development happens rapidly. Proto wants to make navigation more accurate for underserved markets by crowdsourcing mapping data and allowing contributors to easily upload images with their mobile phones, a process incentivized by token rewards. Launched in late January, Proto has achieved 75% of Google Maps’ coverage of Bangalore through a network of 400 users.
Stage: Raising seed
Company name: Dinari
What it does: The global tokenized stock exchange
Founders: Gabriel Otte, Chas Rampenthal, Jake Timothy
The pitch: Global demand for U.S. securities has skyrocketed, yet access remains rather limited. Traditional brokerages have a high barrier of entry for foreign users, while early attempts to tokenize securities such as Ondo restrict certain features. Registered with the SEC, Dinari offers a way for non-U.S. investors to buy stocks via stablecoins. Its unique advantage is that its tokens are backed by real-world stocks. The platform’s TVL has grown to $500,000.
Stage: Closed a $10 million seed round; raising Series A
Alliance DAO invites a range of crypto experts to speak to cohorts about their domain knowledge. This time around, its guest mentors include Jacquelyn Melinek, founder of Token Relations and TechCrunch’s former crypto reporter; Jason Yanowitz, founder of Blockworks; Ming Ng, founder of Jupiter; Greg DiPrisco, founder of Ajna and M^0 Labs; Seung Yoon “SY” Lee, founder of Story Protocol; David Vorick, founder of Sia and Glow; and Ilja Moisejevs & Richard Wu, founders of Tensor.
Apple on Thursday reported a 10% drop in iPhone sales for the second fiscal quarter, dropping from $51.3 billion to $45.9 billion, year-over-year. The slowdown was fueled, in part, by an 8% drop in China.
Apple’s slow adoption of AI versus competitors like Google and Microsoft likely played a role in consumers’ decision to hold off on purchasing a new iPhone. Apple has promised some big announcements on that front (likely at WWDC in June), but the iPhone 16 itself likely won’t arrive until fall.
In spite of those dire hardware figures, however, the company still managed to beat Wall Street expectations, fueled by both an increase on services revenue and a massive $110 billion stock buyback — a jump over last year’s $90 billion purchase.
Developing…
Hubble Network has become the first company in history to establish a Bluetooth connection directly to a satellite — a critical technology validation for the company, potentially opening the door to connecting millions more devices anywhere in the world.
The Seattle-based startup launched its first two satellites to orbit on SpaceX’s Transporter-10 ride-share mission in March; since that time, the company confirmed that it has received signals from the onboard 3.5mm Bluetooth chips from over 600 kilometers away.
The sky is truly the limit for space-enabled Bluetooth devices: the startup says its technology can be used in markets including logistics, cattle tracking, smart collars for pets, GPS watches for kids, car inventory, construction sites, and soil temperature monitoring. Haro said the low-hanging fruit is those industries that are desperate for network coverage even once per day, like remote asset monitoring for the oil and gas industry. As the constellation scales, Hubble will turn its attention to sectors that may need more frequent updates, like soil monitoring, to continuous coverage use cases like fall monitoring for the elderly.
Once its up and running, a customer would simply need to integrate their devices’ chipsets with a piece of firmware to enable connection to Hubble’s network.
Hubble was founded in 2021 by Life360 co-founder Alex Haro, Iotera founder Ben Wild (who sold his startup to Ring), and aerospace engineer John Kim. Haro said the first time Wild presented the idea of connecting a Bluetooth chip to a satellite, his initial reaction was, “No freaking way.” And it does sound crazy, especially as consumer electronics can struggle to connect to other Bluetooth-enabled devices that are just a few feet away.
But the demand is there: existing IoT device are power hungry, are costly to operate, and lack global connectivity, the company says. These are fundamental limitations related to Bluetooth-enabled devices today, and they prevent many industries from leveraging IoT for their businesses.
The company joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 cohort and closed a $20 million Series A last March. Hubble’s first innovation was to develop software enabling off-the-shelf Bluetooth chips to communicate over very long ranges with low power.
On the space side, the company also patented a phased array antenna that can launch on a small satellite. The antennas work almost like a magnifying glass, and it’s what enables an off-the-shelf Bluetooth chip to communicate with the Hubble satellite. The team also had to solve Doppler-related problems, frequency mismatches occur between fast-moving objects exchanging data via radio waves.
One of Hubble’s satellites in a terrestrial test chamber.
Hubble is aiming to launch a third satellite on SpaceX’s Transporter-11 mission this summer and a fourth on Transporter-13. Those four satellites will compose what Haro called the “beta constellation,” and pilot customers are starting to turn their integrations on even today, he said. The startup plans to launch the following 32 satellites all at once in the fourth quarter of 2025 or the beginning of 2026, though the launch provider has not been selected yet.
Those 36 satellites will compose Hubble’s first “production constellation,” and they’ll enable connection with a Hubble satellite roughly 2-3 hours per day from anywhere in the world.
Lacey Hunter thought all was well as she put her startup through the three-month Newchip accelerator. Then the organization filed for bankruptcy in May 2023. Things went from bad to worse later that year when she discovered warrants of her company — rights to buy an ownership stake — had become part of the proceedings, which ultimately forced her to shut down her company.
In 2022, Hunter started TechAid, an AI smart-matching tool for humanitarian aid, and was just beginning the accelerator’s curriculum when Newchip filed for bankruptcy.
“I made a few friends, but functionally, got nothing from Newchip,” Hunter said. “I was shooting to have the curriculum done by August, but in May, the website went down.”
The now-defunct Austin accelerator had filed for bankruptcy amid employee and customer discontent. The court has since ordered the company to auction off the warrants it held in more than 1,000 of the startups that went through the accelerator program.
Normally, private companies like startups have control over which investors are allowed to buy shares and the prices they pay. But the bankruptcy court, which works to restore creditors rather than equity holders, isn’t allowing Newchip’s startups to exert that kind of control. Instead, the auctions are ongoing, with the first tranche already sold and upcoming tranches expected to be sold this spring and summer.
Founders are outraged — including some, like Hunter, who have actually lost their companies as a result.
TechAid fought the sale of the warrants prior to closing the company. Hunter tried to buy them back herself from Newchip, but the organization’s lawyers declined her offer, she told TechCrunch. She had lined up a grant from a bank to help fund her offer, but it ultimately told her no because it was too risky for them to be involved with an unknown warrant holder on her cap table. So Hunter felt she had no choice but to shut TechAid.
“There was no path,” Hunter said. “I knew I was not going to be able to raise money. I mean, I couldn’t even get a no-strings-attached grant. I totally get that, but it still sucks.”
Newchip started out as an aggregator of top deals from “various equity-based crowdfunding platforms,” according to Silicon Hills News, and later evolved into an accelerator that promised to help startups grow their companies and meet investors — for a hefty fee.
It charged startups between a few thousand dollars and $18,000 to $20,000 for its training programs, founders said. Startups also granted Newchip the right to buy $250,000 worth of shares in the company at a later date, but at their current valuation — this type of deal is also known as a warrant.
Newchip founder and CEO Andrew Ryan previously faced harsh criticism about his leadership style, including allegations that he could be “abusive” and threatening to employees, according to eight former employees who walked out. (Ryan acknowledged to TechCrunch last year that his leadership style was based on “a military mindset.”) One example involved a meeting of about 15 employees in sales, operations and marketing. Ryan had asked the leaders of each department to read a book on how to help college volunteers be more passionate about volunteering, recalled one person who attended the meeting. Ryan asked two of the company’s leaders to lead the group in a discussion of the book. But many were confused by it and didn’t see how it applied to Newchip’s business.
“They were struggling with it. Andrew kept jumping in and interrupting them, and directly challenging them.” And finally, recalled the source, Ryan said, “This was a test for individuals that I’ve asked to do this today. I was going to fire one of you, based on whoever did the worst job.”
He then singled out one person, told the room the person was fired, and, this person recalled, Ryan then said, “I do stuff sometimes to see who’s loyal and to see who is going to do what I tell them to do. This was a test and you failed. You’re out.’”
After seeing Ryan fire this guy in front of the whole room, “I literally watched all of his direct reports sitting there saying to themselves, ‘I will never trust this man again,’” the source said.
Ryan contends that the person who was fired during that meeting had behaved aggressively after being singled out. Ryan also claims that the individual had come unprepared to lead the meeting, which Ryan viewed as an “act of overt insubordination,” telling TechCrunch: “While conducting the termination publicly in that meeting may seem harsh, it was intended to reinforce the gravity of the situation and ensure all managers understood that we took these training sessions and their responsibilities as leaders seriously.”
Image Credits: TechCrunch
When Newchip (which also did business under the name Astralabs) initially filed for bankruptcy in March 2023, it was a Chapter 11 debt reorg. It then went into Chapter 7 — dissolution and liquidation — two months later.
Its Chapter 11 filing revealed that it had $1.7 million in total assets and $4.8 million in total liabilities. But the value of the warrants was apparently not taken into account at that time, a source familiar with internal happenings said. Those warrants were estimated to be valued at an eye-popping just under $500 million by Austin-based VC fund and early Newchip investor Sputnik ATX, according to a document viewed by TechCrunch.
“I feel so much stress and embarrassment. I’m a struggling founder and don’t have the money to pay for a lawyer. Here was this accelerator supposed to help founders, and instead it is imposing stress on young founders.”
Management had not been keeping up with the warrants to the point where it had missed that some companies had exited or raised money, losing out on the potential upside, noted Kerstin Hadzik, a consultant who was brought in to serve as interim CFO a few weeks after the initial bankruptcy filing.
How much did Newchip potentially lose? Sputnik ATX said it identified $54 million in warrant value from companies that had liquidity events “that should have been reported to Newchip but were not,” according to documents viewed by TechCrunch.
In Hadzik’s view, Newchip might have also been saved from going into Chapter 7 if Ryan had been willing to step down as CEO and had presented the warrants as assets when initially filing for Chapter 11.
The judge repeatedly asked Ryan if he would voluntarily step down and let someone else, such as a chief restructuring officer, run the company. Ryan repeatedly dodged the question, expressing doubt that anyone could do so successfully. Ryan also noted that employees had requested “a new CEO” and later claimed that he “was going to step aside … but the shareholders and investors, as part of them putting capital in, preferred that I stay here to make sure that we have the capital … to continue driving the business.”
Ryan also admitted that he was the company’s “major owner and shareholder” and that he had just “terminated all the board” the week before, just after having filed for bankruptcy, according to court documents viewed by TechCrunch.
“The judge was offering like a lifeline,” and Ryan “just said no,” Hadzik recalled.
In a Zoom interview with TechCrunch back when we first reported on the bankruptcy, and in two LinkedIn posts in 2023, Ryan said that he accepted “full responsibility for the events at Newchip.”
Ryan later alleged that there was an attempted coup on the part of an investor but sources say that Ryan had actually asked early investor Joe Merrill to serve as CEO before changing his mind and resuming the role himself. Merrill, who was an early investor in Newchip under its previous model and also co-founder of Sputnik ATX, declined to comment beyond noting that he believed the attempted sale of the warrants was a valid move.
One founder, who asked to remain anonymous, told TechCrunch that Newchip had approached her on LinkedIn and told her if she got approved to join, she would get introductions to investors. So she paid a $7,500 deposit and was all set to join Newchip when a founder friend told her to “never pay for introductions.”
She decided to hear out Ryan. What convinced her to ask for her money back was that Ryan “blew off our meeting.” He reached out later, but she had already emailed Newchip asking for her deposit back on the basis that she had not started yet.
The founder got her money back, but Newchip didn’t void her contract, so she is now part of the bankruptcy lawsuit. That’s when she learned that someone could buy the warrants of her company for pennies on the dollar, and “it could screw your valuation going forward,” she said.
“I feel so much stress and embarrassment,” she told TechCrunch. “I’m a struggling founder and don’t have the money to pay for a lawyer. Here was this accelerator supposed to help founders, and instead it is imposing stress on young founders.”
There was a period of time when founders could object to their warrants being sold, according to Chad Harding, managing partner at Peak Technology Partners, the investment banking firm tasked by the court to sell the warrants.
The deadline for those in the first tranche to object to these sales was January 15, he told TechCrunch. Founders from all over the world, including Australia and Finland, filed objections, according to court documents.
“We were in the process of obtaining a refund from Newchip when Newchip went bust,” wrote Veronica Hey, CEO and founder of Australian startup Ok Away. “The contract is therefore null and void and the warrant attached to it is not applicable. None of this will stand up in an Australian court. If you continue to pursue in ‘selling’ this warrant you are selling something that does not exist and there will be repercussions.”
But startups’ objections were made in vain when the court overruled them. A bankruptcy court’s goal is to oversee the selling of assets to settle debts. If there is money left over, it’s paid to shareholders. Ryan is the majority shareholder.
So the warrants are being sold in three tranches. The first involved 133 companies, including for startups such as Cleanster.com, bitewell, Agshift and Firehawk Aerospace. Combined, those 133 startups had raised over $340 million in funding, according to documents shared by the sales agent with potential investors and viewed by TechCrunch.
Ultimately, the sales agent ended up selling 28 warrants in just four companies from the first tranche for a total of about $58,000, presumably at a discount. Successful bidders included Bitewell and ClearForce — startups that bought back their own warrants in advance for $5,000 each, according to an agreement with the trustee — as well as Palm Ventures and Angel Deal Syndicate. The latter purchased the bulk of the warrants, spending $43,000 on warrants in 24 companies, according to court documents viewed by TechCrunch.
The second tranche will likely be sold this summer and will include over 1,400 warrants for sale, according to Harding. The bid deadline will likely be late July, Harding said.
Founders of those startups included in the second tranche will also have the opportunity to object with a proposed deadline of May 31.
Ryan maintains that extensive efforts “have been made to notify stakeholders well in advance.”
“This has afforded ample time for interested parties to access information and documents, raise any objections or issues, and prepare for participation in the sale,” Ryan told TechCrunch.
Like TechAid’s Hunter, Garrett Temple blames the loss of his company on Newchip’s demise. He, similar to Hunter, also participated in Newchip’s accelerator program from January until May 2023. His startup, Novogiene, was a medical tech company focused on epidemic prevention.
Temple put around $7,500 on his credit cards to be part of the program and said that he never spoke with investors. His main reason for doing Newchip was to get investors for a $500,000 round, in part to pay for a small production run of his device so he could send it to universities and medical schools for pilot testing.
The meetings with investors were supposed to happen after a demo day that was scheduled for the summer. But when Newchip shut down in May, that demo day, and hence those introductions, didn’t happen. Temple wasn’t able to keep going and ended up dissolving Novogiene in the summer of 2023. As such, his company no longer existed for warrants to be sold to potential investors.
Temple said he spoke with his bank about getting money back from the program since he used credit cards. The bank was at first successful in getting $5,000 returned. However, about a month later, Temple noticed that money was no longer in his account and believes Newchip protested the funds.
Though Temple has moved on, he still has some intellectual property for Novogiene and says he is hoping at some point to license the technology to someone else or perhaps at another time pick up where he left off.
“It was very sad to call it quits because getting the funding to make those units was the only hurdle before making serious progress,” Temple said. “If they connected me with investors like they said, I could have made my invention, gotten efficacy and would be shipping units right now. I really do believe that.”
Accelerator operators sell dreams. But that doesn’t always mean that the accelerator will come through. And sadly, the founders who buy into those dreams can be the ones who end up paying the price.
Tesla has issued a recall for the Cybertruck due to a problem where the accelerator pedal can get stuck, putting drivers at risk of a crash, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The recall caps a tumultuous week for Tesla. The company laid off more than 10% of its workforce on Monday, and lost two of its highest-ranking executives. A few days later, Tesla asked shareholders to re-vote on CEO Elon Musk’s massive compensation package that was struck down by a judge earlier this year.
Reports of problems with the Cybertruck’s accelerator pedal started popping up in the last few weeks. Tesla even reportedly paused deliveries of the truck while it sorted out the issue. Musk said in a post on X that Tesla was “being very cautious” and the company reported to NHTSA that it was not aware of any crashes or injuries related to the problem.
The company has now confirmed to NHTSA that the pedal can dislodge, making it possible for it to slide up and get caught in the trim around the footwell.
Tesla said it first received a notice of one of these accelerator pedal incidents from a customer on March 31, and then a second one on April 3. After performing a series of tests, it decided on April 12 to issue a recall after determining that an “[a]n unapproved change introduced lubricant (soap) to aid in the component assembly of the pad onto the accelerator pedal,” and that “[r]esidual lubricant reduced the retention of the pad to the pedal.”
Tesla says it will replace or rework the accelerator pedal on all existing Cybertrucks — which, according to the documents, it has shipped 3,878 to date. It also told NHTSA that it has started building Cybertrucks with a new accelerator pedal, and that it’s fixing the vehicles that are in transit or sitting at delivery centers.
While the Cybertruck only first started shipping late last year, this is not the vehicle’s first recall. But the initial one was minor: Earlier this year, Tesla recalled the software on all of its vehicles because the font sizes of its warning lights were too small.
Betaworks is embracing the AI trend not with yet another LLM, but instead a clutch of agent-type models automating everyday tasks that nevertheless aren’t so simple to define. The investor’s latest “Camp” incubator trained up and funded 9 AI agent startups they hope will take on today’s more tedious tasks.
The use cases for many of these companies sound promising, but AI tends to have trouble keeping its promises. Would you trust a shiny new AI to sort your email for you? What about extracting and structuring information from a webpage? Will anyone mind an AI slotting meetings in wherever works?
There’s an element of trust that has yet to be established with these services, something that occurs with most technologies that change how we act. Asking MapQuest for directions felt weird until it didn’t — and now GPS navigation is an everyday tool. But are AI agents at that stage? Betaworks CEO and founder John Borthwick thinks so. (Disclosure: Former TechCrunch editor and Disrupt host Jordan Crook left TC to work at the firm.)
“You’re keying into something that we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about,” he told TechCrunch. “While agentic AI is in its nascence — and there are issues at hand around success rates of agents, etc — we’re seeing tremendous strides even since Camp started.”
While the tech will continue improving, Borthwick explained some customers are ready to embrace it in its current state.
“Historically, we’ve seen customers take a leap of faith, even with higher-stakes tasks, if a product was ‘good enough.’ The original Bill.com, despite doing interesting things with OCR and email scraping, didn’t always get it right, and users still trusted it with thousands of dollars worth of transactions because it made a terrible task less terrible. And over time, through highly communicative interface design, the feedback loops from those customers created an even better, more reliable product,” he said.
“For now, most of the early users of the products in Camp are developers and founders and early tech adopters, and that group has always been willing to patiently test and deliver feedback on these products, which eventually leap over to the mainstream.”
Betaworks Camp is a three-month accelerator in which selected companies in the chosen theme get hands-on help with their product, strategy, and connections before getting shooed out the door with a $500K check — courtesy of Betaworks itself, Mozilla Ventures, Differential Ventures, and Stem AI. But not before the startups strut their stuff on demo day, May 7.
We got a look at the lineup beforehand, though. Here are the three that stuck out to me the most.
Twin automates tasks using an “action model” the likes of which we’ve heard Rabbit talk about for a few months now (but have not yet shipped). By training a model on lots of data representing software interfaces, it can (these companies claim) learn how to complete common tasks, things that are more complex than an API can handle, yet not so much that they can’t be delegated to a “smart intern.” We actually wrote them up back in January.
So instead of having a backend engineer build a custom script to do a certain task, you can demonstrate or describe in ordinary language. Stuff like “put all the resumés we got today in a folder in Dropbox and rename them after the applicant, then DM me the share link in Slack.” And once you’ve tweaked that workflow (“Oops, this time add the application date to the file names”) it can just be the new way that process works. Automate the 20% of tasks that take up 80% of our time is the company’s goal — whether it can do so affordably is probably the real question. (Twin declined to elaborate on the nature of their model and training process.)
Skej aims to ameliorate the occasionally painful process of finding a meeting time that works for two (or three, or four…) people. You just cc the bot on an email or Slack thread and it’ll start the process of reconciling everyone’s availability and preferences. If it has access to schedules, it’ll check those; if someone says they’d prefer the afternoon if it’s on Thursday, it works with that; you can say some people get priority; and so on. Anyone who works with a skilled executive assistant knows they are irreplaceable, but chances are every EA out there would rather spend less time on tasks that are just a bunch of “How about this? No? How about this?”
Image Credits: Skej
As a misanthrope, I don’t have this scheduling problem, but I appreciate that others do, and also would prefer a “set it and forget it” type solution where they just acquiesce with the results. And it’s well within the capabilities of today’s AI agents, which would primarily be tasked with understanding natural language rather than forms.
Jsonify is an evolution of website scrapers that can extract data from relatively unstructured contexts. This has been done for ages, but the engine extracting the info has never been all that smart. If it’s a big, flat document they work fine — if it’s in on-site tabs or some poorly coded visual list meant for humans to click around, they can fail. Jsonify uses the improved understanding of today’s visual AI models to better parse and sort data that may be inaccessible to simple crawlers.
Image Credits: Jsonify
So you could do a search for Airbnb options in a given area, then have Jsonify dump them all into a structured list with columns for price, distance from the airport, rating, hidden fees etc. Then you could go do the same thing at Vacasa and extract the same data — maybe for the same places (I did this and saved like $150 the other day, but I wish I could have automated the process). Or, you know, do professional stuff.
But doesn’t the imprecision inherent to LLMs make them a questionable tool for the job? “We’ve managed to build a pretty robust guardrail and cross-checking system,” said founder Ananth Manivannan. “We use a few different models at runtime for understanding the page, which provide some validation — and the LLMs we use are fine-tuned to our use case, so they’re usually pretty reliable even without the guardrail layer. Typically we see 95%+ extraction accuracy, depending on the use case..”
I could see any of these being useful in probably any tech-forward business. The others in the cohort are a bit more technical or situational — here are the remaining 6:
There’s little doubt AI agents will play some role in the increasingly automated software workflows of the near future, but the nature and extent of that role is as yet unwritten. Clearly Betaworks aims to get their foot in the door early even if some of the products aren’t quite ready for their mass market debut just yet.
You’ll be able to see the companies show of their agentic wares on May 7.
Google.org, Google’s charitable wing, is launching a new program to help fund nonprofits developing tech that leverages generative AI.
Called Google.org Accelerator: Generative AI, the program is to be funded by $20 million in grants and include 21 nonprofits to start, including Quill.org, a company creating AI-powered tools for student writing feedback, and World Bank, which is building a generative AI app to make development research more accessible.
In addition to funding, nonprofits in the six-month accelerator program will get access to technical training, workshops, mentors and guidance from an “AI coach.” And, through Google.org’s fellowship program, teams of Google employees will work with three of the nonprofits — Tarjimly, Benefits Data Trust and mRelief — full-time for up to six months to help launch their proposed generative AI tools.
Tarjimly aims to use AI to translate languages for refugees, while Benefits Data Trust is tapping AI to create assistants that support caseworkers in helping low-income applicants enroll in public benefits. mRelief, meanwhile, is designing a tool to streamline the U.S. SNAP benefits application process.
“Generative AI can help social impact teams be more productive, creative and effective in serving their communities,” Annie Lewin, director of global advocacy at Google.org, said in a blog post. “Google.org funding recipients report that AI helps them achieve their goals in one third of the time at nearly half the cost.”
According to a PwrdBy survey, 73% of nonprofits believe AI innovation aligns with their missions and 75% believe AI makes their lives easier, particularly in areas like donor categorization, routine back-office tasks and “mission-driven” initiatives. But there remain significant barriers for nonprofits looking to build their own AI solutions or adopt third-party products — chiefly cost, resources and time.
In the blog post, Lewin cites a Google.org survey that similarly found that, while four in five nonprofits think generative AI may be applicable to their work, nearly half currently aren’t using the tech as a result of a range of internal and external roadblocks. “[These nonprofits] cite a lack of tools, awareness, training and funding as the biggest barriers to adoption,” she said.
Encouragingly, the number of nonprofit AI-focused startups is beginning to tick up.
Nonprofit accelerator Fast Forward said that this year, more than a third of applicants for its latest class were AI companies. And Crunchbase reports that, more broadly, dozens of nonprofit organizations across the globe are dedicating work around ethical approaches to AI, like AI ethics lab AlgorithmWatch, virtual reading clinic JoyEducation and conservation advocacy group Earth05.
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