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Fisker starts new round of layoffs to 'preserve cash' | TechCrunch

April 29, 2024 11:54 PM0


EV startup Fisker Inc. is laying off more employees to “preserve cash,” one week after warning investors it would have to make cuts to stave off impending bankruptcy, according to an internal email viewed by TechCrunch.

Founder and CEO Henrik Fisker told employees Monday morning in the email that the company is “continuing to evaluate all viable options for our business, including a potential transaction, and we are committed to identifying potential buyers and pathways to infuse capital into the business.”

“That said, we must preserve cash to help keep these options available to us,” he wrote. He previously told staff in meeting last week that the company was still meeting with car companies under NDA, which was first reported by Business Insider.

“[I]t is with great personal pain and sadness that I deliver the difficult news that today we are making further reductions to our workforce,” Fisker wrote in the email.

It’s unclear how many employees Fisker Inc. is cutting. A spokesperson did not immediately didn’t respond to a request for comment. Fisker employed 1,135 people as of April 19, according to a regulatory filing. It previously announced cuts of 15% in February.

The company announced last week that it hired a chief restructuring officer who is now in charge of approving Fisker Inc.’s budget, as well as the decision-making process for any sale ofthe business. It reported having just $54 million in cash and equivalents as of April 16.

 


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

After 6-year hiatus, Stripe to start taking crypto payments, starting with USDC stablecoin | TechCrunch

April 26, 2024 8:09 AM0


Stripe, the fintech giant, continues to inch its way back into the cryptocurrency market. On Thursday the company announced that it would let customers accept cryptocurrency payments, starting with just one currency in particular, USDC stablecoins, initially only on Solana, Ethereum and Polygon. This will be the first time that Stripe has taken crypto payments since 2018, when it dropped support for Bitcoin due to it being too unstable.

Stripe in 2022 tried its first reentry into the crypto market when it announced payouts (but not payments) in USDC, with Twitter as its marquee customer for the service. Thursday’s news has no customer names attached to it.

Stripe co-founder and president John Collison is due to announce the news at the company’s Connect developer conference taking place this week in San Francisco.

“Transaction settlements are no longer comparable with Christopher Nolan films for length,” he said earlier Thursday. “And transaction costs are no longer comparable with Christopher Nolan films for budget. Stripe is bringing back crypto payments — this time with stablecoins, which are a way better experience.”

On Wednesday the company unveiled a long list of other launches, the most significant update being that Stripe, for the very first time, would let customers integrate competing payment providers with Stripe’s other financial services tooling. Thursday’s nod to expanding crypto support is also part of that bigger strategy to open up its walled garden.

A brief timeline of Stripe’s dance with crypto underscores the tricky line that Stripe has walked over the years when it comes to cryptocurrency. True to its disruptive roots as a fintech, the company has wanted to be in the middle of the conversation around how blockchain-based technologies will affect financial services. But it runs the risk of subverting its bigger business and positioning as a stable and sensible financial powerhouse if it dabbles too deeply or for too long in periods of instability. The company processed $1 trillion in transactions last year, and it’s still growing; it is currently worth $65 billion on paper.

Stripe, doubling down on embedded finance, de-couples payments from the rest of its stack

In 2014, Stripe launched its first efforts into cryptocurrency with tests on Bitcoin, the first big cryptocurrency. “Stripe’s support is crucial here due to the nature of Bitcoin: It doesn’t have all the qualities normally expected of money,” said one of its earliest testing partners at the time. 

By 2018, it pulled all of that activity, saying it was too volatile and unstable. “Over the past year or two, as block size limits have been reached, Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange,” the company said in its announcement. “This has led to Bitcoin becoming less useful for payments.”

Cue June 2019 and Facebook getting hot on crypto. Stripe became one of the founding members of Libra.

But not for long! By October 2019, Stripe, along with others, dropped support for Facebook’s efforts. “Stripe is supportive of projects that aim to make online commerce more accessible for people around the world. Libra has this potential,” it said at the time. “We will follow its progress closely and remain open to working with the Libra Association at a later stage.”

It took three more years for the company to try out crypto once more, with its turn to Twitter and stablecoin (USDC) payouts with Twitter.

Given that longer look, it’s anyone’s guess whether Stripe will stay the course with this latest launch and what sort of timeline its efforts will take. From what we understand, though, it’s already evaluating other stablecoins and platforms and sees an opportunity, at least for now.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Defense startup True Anomaly lays off around 25%, cancels summer internship | TechCrunch

April 26, 2024 4:51 AM0


Space and defense startup True Anomaly has laid off around 25% of its workforce and cancelled its summer internship program, TechCrunch has learned.

“With our rapid growth over the past two years, we looked at every aspect of our company to make sure we are laser focused on our goals and best positioned to execute,” a company spokesperson said. “We identified the duplication of roles and functions across the company, and as such, reduced our headcount. This won’t impact our ability to execute on our contracts with customers or on our mission to bring security and sustainability to the space domain.”

While TechCrunch could not confirm the total headcount prior to these layoffs, True Anomaly had over 100 employees as of December 2023, it told the Denver Business Journal. Nearly 30 people were cut from the workforce, according to a post on LinkedIn from one of the people let go.

Employees started posting on LinkedIn about the layoffs on April 24; according to those messages, people impacted worked in sales, business development and recruiting. At least some interns were abruptly told the summer internship program was cancelled last Friday, on April 19, as well. The internship was set to start on June 1.

The Centennial, Colorado-based startup closed a $100 million financing round last December; at the time, executives said staff had swelled to 107 employees. Earlier this month, True Anomaly CEO Even Rogers told TechCrunch during an interview on the company’s first mission that the company was “well-capitalized.”

True Anomaly hopes to modernize space defense with its Jackal spacecraft and Mosaic software platform for command and control operations. The startup envisions using Jackals on orbit to approach, image, and gather intelligence on other objects in orbit.

True Anomaly launched that first mission, called Mission X, on March 4, though it ended early after the company failed to establish reliable communications with the two spacecraft that were deployed in orbit. The anomaly is hardly slowing them down, however. The startup is pushing to launch at least twice more in the next 12 months, aiming for another launch in October, one person told TechCrunch.

The person was offered an internship, and spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity, saying that a technical recruiter suggested that the internship program had been cancelled because the company didn’t have the human bandwidth to organize and supervise an intern project. The team is also starting work on the $30 million responsive space contract that the company was awarded earlier this month, the person said.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Playruo lets you try game demos from your web browser | TechCrunch

April 25, 2024 1:46 PM0


It’s still unclear whether cloud gaming will ever become the next big thing. The appeal is clear: The game you’re playing runs in a data center near you, and the video output is directly streamed to your local device. When you interact with the game, everything is relayed back to the data center.

When it works, it’s an amazing experience. It’s a flexible, easy way to play games across multiple devices without buying new hardware. That’s why many companies have launched services that let you play games remotely — there’s Nvidia’s GeForce Now service, Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming, Amazon Luna, and Google’s now-defunct Stadia cloud gaming service.

But the vast majority of people still play video games on their own, local devices. A French company called Shadow tried something different by bringing your entire computer to the cloud: It isn’t just cloud gaming, it’s cloud computing. You can access Windows in the cloud and install anything you want. But Shadow hasn’t become a mainstream service either.

Fergus Leleu, Jean-Baptiste Kempf and Yannis Weinbach — three former employees at Shadow — decided to leave the company and try something different with their new startup, Playruo. Instead of letting you play your games in the cloud, their new company lets you play game demos in the cloud.

Click on a link to launch a game demo

In many ways, Playruo delivers on the original promise of Google’s Stadia: It lets you launch and play a video game from your web browser without having to install anything. Just like people share Google Docs links to share a document, game publishers can turn a game demo into a shareable link.

Behind the scenes, Playruo’s streaming technology is based on Kyber, a bi-directional streaming technology created by Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the CTO of Playruo. Kempf is also better known as the president of VideoLAN, the organization behind the popular open-source video player, VLC. He has also worked on various video encoders and decoders used by some of the largest video platforms, including Netflix and YouTube.

Playruo relies heavily on open-source software components, such as FFmpeg to encode the audio and video streams, and libVLC to decode the stream on your local device. The company uses QUIC for the transport layer network protocol.

I tried a couple of demos in Google Chrome on macOS, and the service worked as expected. You can start playing just a few seconds after clicking on the demo link, and on a solid fiber connection via Wi-Fi, it felt like I was playing a game locally.

How to make a viral game

There are thousands of games released on PC and game consoles every year. Unless you have a gigantic marketing budget, it’s hard to stand out.

Even worse, game publishers are also competing with old games. Some of the most played games of 2023 have been around for more than a decade — think Minecraft, DOTA 2, GTA V, or League of Legends. It’s arguably one of the reasons why there have been so many rounds of layoffs in the game industry recently.

Playruo’s pitch is that it can be used by game publishers as part of a launch campaign to maximize their chances of success. For instance, at the end of a video trailer, a publisher could embed thumbnail on YouTube with a link to the demo so you can try out the game easily.

Playruo links can also be integrated in game launchers. Imagine a popular Twitch streamer sharing a link to a multiplayer game demo so that viewers can team up with their favorite Twitch content creator.

Unlike traditional cloud gaming services, Playruo’s client here is the game’s publisher, and they pay the startup to offer a demo. Chances are that a demo that becomes viral will lead to increased game sales. Playruo is already working with Old Skull Games to promote Cryptical Path.

“We know the cloud gaming business model pretty well from our past experience. The big pitfall is that the various platforms do everything they can to prevent you from using the service too much,” Playruo’s co-founder and head of product, Weinbach, told me.

“It’s a bit ridiculous and counterintuitive. So we thought about a business model where it’s interesting for us that people stay for a long time,” he said. In other words, a viral demo could be considered as a success for a game publisher.

Playruo will have to make sure that it can quickly scale its fleet of servers (up and down) based on demand. The company relies on public cloud companies that offer virtual machines with GPUs, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Scaleway.

This will be a critical part of Playruo’s model. If the startup has too many servers running without anyone launching demos, it’ll lead to an expensive hosting bill at the end of the month. If the startup doesn’t have enough servers, many gamers will receive an error when they try to launch a demo.

But if it works well, Playruo can act as the top of the funnel for game purchases. After a 15-minute demo, players can get a link to add a game to their Steam wishlist, join a Discord server, or enter their email address to get more information. And they may not even realize that they played a game that wasn’t installed on their system.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Exclusive: Eric Schmidt-backed Augment, a GitHub Copilot rival, launches out of stealth with $252M

April 25, 2024 2:16 AM0


AI is supercharging coding — and developers are embracing it.

In a recent StackOverflow poll, 44% of software engineers said that they use AI tools as part of their development processes now and 26% plan to soon. Gartner estimates that over half of organizations are currently piloting or have already deployed AI-driven coding assistants, and that 75% of developers will use coding assistants in some form by 2028.

Ex-Microsoft software developer Igor Ostrovsky believes that soon, there won’t be a developer who doesn’t use AI in their workflows. “Software engineering remains a difficult and all-too-often tedious and frustrating job, particularly at scale,” he told TechCrunch. “AI can improve software quality, team productivity and help restore the joy of programming.”

So Ostrovsky decided to build the AI-powered coding platform that he himself would want to use.

That platform is Augment, and on Wednesday it emerged from stealth with $252 million in funding at a near-unicorn ($977 million) post-money valuation. With investments from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and VCs including Index Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Innovation Endeavors and Meritech Capital, Augment aims to shake up the still-nascent market for generative AI coding technologies.

“Most companies are dissatisfied with the programs they produce and consume; software is too often fragile, complex and expensive to maintain with development teams bogged down with long backlogs for feature requests, bug fixes, security patches, integration requests, migrations and upgrades,” Ostrovsky said. “Augment has both the best team and recipe for empowering programmers and their organizations to deliver high-quality software quicker.”

Ostrovsky spent nearly seven years at Microsoft before joining Pure Storage, a startup developing flash data storage hardware and software products, as a founding engineer. While at Microsoft, Ostrovsky worked on components of Midori, a next-generation operating system the company never released but whose concepts have made their way into other Microsoft projects over the last decade.

In 2022, Ostrovsky and Guy Gur-Ari, previously an AI research scientist at Google, teamed up to create Augment’s MVP. To fill out the startup’s executive ranks, Ostrovsky and Gur-Ari brought on Scott Dietzen, ex-CEO of Pure Storage, and Dion Almaer, formerly a Google engineering director and a VP of engineering at Shopify.

Augment remains a strangely hush-hush operation.

In our conversation, Ostrovsky wasn’t willing to say much about the user experience or even the generative AI models driving Augment’s features (whatever they may be) — save that Augment is using fine-tuned “industry-leading” open models of some sort.

He did say how Augment plans to make money: standard software-as-a-service subscriptions. Pricing and other details will be revealed later this year, Ostrovsky added, closer to Augment’s planned GA release.

“Our funding provides many years of runway to continue to build what we believe to be the best team in enterprise AI,” he said. “We’re accelerating product development and building out Augment’s product, engineering and go-to-market functions as the company gears up for rapid growth.”

Rapid growth is perhaps the best shot Augment has at making waves in an increasingly cutthroat industry.

Practically every tech giant offers its own version of an AI coding assistant. Microsoft has GitHub Copilot, which is by far the firmest entrenched with over 1.3 million paying individual and 50,000 enterprise customers as of February. Amazon has AWS’ CodeWhisperer. And Google has Gemini Code Assist, recently rebranded from Duet AI for Developers.

Elsewhere, there’s a torrent of coding assistant startups: Magic, Tabnine, Codegen, Refact, TabbyML, Sweep, Laredo and Cognition (which reportedly just raised $175 million), to name a few. Harness and JetBrains, which developed the Kotlin programming language, recently released their own. So did Sentry (albeit with more of a cybersecurity bent). 

Can they all — plus Augment now — do business harmoniously together? It seems unlikely. Eye-watering compute costs alone make the AI coding assistant business a challenging one to maintain. Overruns related to training and serving models forced generative AI coding startup Kite to shut down in December 2022. Even Copilot loses money, to the tune of around $20 to $80 a month per user, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Ostrovsky implies that there’s momentum behind Augment already; he claims that “hundreds” of software developers across “dozens” of companies including payment startup Keeta (which is also Eric Schmidt-backed) are using Augment in early access. But will the uptake sustain? That’s the million-dollar question, indeed.

I also wonder if Augment has made any steps toward solving the technical setbacks plaguing code-generating AI, particularly around vulnerabilities.

An analysis by GitClear, the developer of the code analytics tool of the same name, found that coding assistants are resulting in more mistaken code being pushed to codebases, creating headaches for software maintainers. Security researchers have warned that generative coding tools tools can amplify existing bugs and exploits in projects. And Stanford researchers have found that developers who accept code recommendations from AI assistants tend to produce less secure code.

Then there’s copyright to worry about.

Augment’s models were undoubtedly trained on publicly available data, like all generative AI models — some of which may’ve been copyrighted or under a restrictive license. Some vendors have argued that fair use doctrine shields them from copyright claims while at the same time rolling out tools to mitigate potential infringement. But that hasn’t stopped coders from filing class action lawsuits over what they allege are open licensing and IP violations.

To all this, Ostrovsky says: “Current AI coding assistants don’t adequately understand the programmer’s intent, improve software quality nor facilitate team productivity, and they don’t properly protect intellectual property. Augment’s engineering team boasts deep AI and systems expertise. We’re poised to bring AI coding assistance innovations to developers and software teams.”

Augment, which is based in Palo Alto, has around 50 employees; Ostrovsky expects that number to double by the end of the year.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Exclusive: Indaband's new app lets you create music with people around the world

April 25, 2024 12:02 AM0


A new social media app called Indaband lets musicians and vocalists collaborate with others and make music with people all over the world. The app is designed to make people who usually play an instrument on their own feel like they’re part of a worldwide band (get it, Indaband?). Record a video of yourself playing an instrument and others can stitch in videos of themselves playing their own instruments on top of your original recording.

All you need to get started on Indaband is a pair of headphones and a smartphone to record yourself. You can choose to upload prerecorded files as new tracks or open the app’s recording booth to record your tracks on top of someone else’s. You can record and mix unlimited video tracks in different sessions using the app’s multitrack video studio and share them with your community. Indaband notifies you when someone collaborates with one of your tracks, so you can see how they added their own take on your content.

The app is the brainchild of CEO Daniel Murta, CTO Andrews Medina, Head of Engineering Helielson Santos and Design Leader Emerson Farias. The co-founders came up with the idea for the app when they were working at a legal technology company called Jusbrasil, which Murta co-founded.

Image Credits: Indaband

They all used to get together to play music during happy hours after work, and once the pandemic hit, they came up with the idea for Indaband so they could still play music together while in quarantine. The group then spent their weekends working on Indaband and eventually ended up leaving Jusbrasil to focus on Indaband full-time.

“Music creation is very hard and involves complex software. So, the whole idea was to redesign this process from scratch and make it simple and out of your smartphone,” Murta told TechCrunch. “The idea was that we would unlock musical expression to a different level to make it simple to collaborate and co-create music.”

Indaband helps users discover songs and jam sessions with daily curated playlists that dive into different genres, like rock, jazz, hip-hop and EDM. Users can like and comment on videos and repost them to their followers.

Indaband plans on launching a new feature called “Circles” that Murta compares to clubs on Strava. Circles will allow users to build their own communities on the app and possibly even hold live events. Indaband may also develop a Patreon-like feature within Circles that would allow established creators to offer paid content. For instance, an established musician could offer virtual lessons on an instrument that they have mastered.

Image Credits: Indaband

While Indaband’s early adopters are skilled musicians who are comfortable sharing their music and recording themselves, Indaband eventually plans to target musicians and singers who are just starting out.

“We want to be known as a place where the musical community flourishes,” Murta said. “There is no place for musical communities right now. So the idea is to be known for that, and our strategy is to make it easy to create, and allow everyone to join the creation process.”

Indaband raised $7 million in seed funding in late 2021. The funding round included several angel investors, including Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and former Megadeth guitar player Kiko Loureiro. The round also included funding from several Latin American VC firms, including Monashees, Astella and Upload Ventures.

The app is free and is available on iOS and Android.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Exclusive: Seed-stage firm Eniac Ventures raises $220M across two funds

April 24, 2024 11:31 PM0


Eniac Ventures has closed two funds totaling $220 million, the seed-stage firm shared exclusively with TechCrunch.

New York-based Eniac has raised $60 million for Select 1, the firm’s vehicle for follow-on later-stage investments in portfolio companies, and $160 million for Eniac VI. The firm has made 11 investments out of Select 1, which actually closed in 2021 but was not publicly announced until now. The firm plans to make its first investment “shortly” out of its sixth fund, according to co-founder and general partner Nihal Mehta. It plans to make about 40 investments across both funds.

When making new investments, Eniac’s average check size is $1.5 million. Follow-on checks are typically larger, Mehta said, with the largest check invested out of its Select fund being $6 million.

Eniac is a sector-agnostic firm, with Mehta describing the team as “pre-product-market-fit generalists.” Despite being sector agnostic, even Eniac has been bitten by the artificial intelligence bug, with Mehta noting that “machine learning and AI has been a predominant theme” for the firm over the past decade.

“There is some hype in AI, but we believe it to be the most transformative wave of computing we have seen since the internet,” he said.

Portfolio companies include 1up Health, Alloy, Anchor, Attentive, Brightwheel, Embrace, Ghost, Hinge, Hive, Level.ai, Maestro, Owlet and Vungle. Eniac also was an early investor in Airbnb and has seen exits in companies such as TapCommerce (to Twitter), Anchor (to Spotify), Dubsmash (to Reddit), Hinge (to IAC), Workflow (to Apple), Vungle (to Blackstone) and Vence (to Merck Animal Health).

Mehta declined to name specific LPs, noting only that they are a mix of “top foundations, endowments, pensions and fund of funds,” and that the majority of them are “mission-driven.”

Despite the challenging fundraising environment, Mehta said the fundraise “ironically was the quickest” Eniac has done in 15 years.

“We attribute this success to being able to return multiple funds in the past few years,” he told TechCrunch, though he declined to provide specific figures around returns.

The size of Eniac’s funds has grown significantly over the years. Eniac raised its inaugural $1.5 million fund in 2010, raised $100 million for its fourth fund in 2017 and raised another $125 million for Eniac Fund V in 2021. Over the years, it has backed more than 250 startups.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Tesla layoffs hit high performers, some departments slashed, sources say | TechCrunch

April 24, 2024 10:07 PM0


Tesla management told employees Monday that the recent layoffs — which gutted some departments by 20% and even hit high performers — were largely due to poor financial performance, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The layoffs were announced to staff just a week before Tesla is scheduled to report its first-quarter earnings. The move comes as Tesla has seen its profit margin narrow over the past several quarters, the result of an EV price war that has persisted for at least a year. The company delivered a record 1.81 million vehicles in 2023. Its margins, however, took a hit after Tesla repeatedly slashed prices in a bid to drum up sales and undercut the competition.

Tesla informed employees that more than 10%, or about 14,000 workers, will be laid off across the global organization that has operations in the United States, Europe and China. In a regulatory filing, Tesla referred to the layoffs as a “company-wide restructuring.” The layoffs, which affected employees across all departments and seniority levels, were made to reduce costs and increase productivity to prepare for its “next phase of growth,” according to an internal email from CEO Elon Musk that TechCrunch has viewed.

High performers also cut

Many of the laid-off employees were high performers, according to two sources who spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity. One source expressed shock at the number of talented employees cut and noted that many of those affected were working on projects that have fallen lower on Tesla’s priority list. The source declined to specify which projects.

Some departments saw layoffs beyond the 10% outlined in the companywide email, according to sources. One manager told TechCrunch that 20% of their employees were cut.

“I lost 20% of my team, some really good players too,” they said.

The shakeup also comes as Musk continues to bend the company’s trajectory toward building fully self-driving cars. Tesla recently dropped plans to build a lower-cost EV that would retail starting at around $25,000, opting instead to use the underlying platform being developed to power an alleged robotaxi that Musk said will debut August 8.

Musk previously tried to prioritize the dedicated robotaxi vehicle project, according to his biographer, Walter Isaacson. In 2022, he told employees that he wanted a “clean robotaxi” with no steering wheel or pedals. Tesla lead designer Franz von Holzhausen and engineering VP Lars Moravy kept running the low-cost EV project in secret and eventually convinced him to make both — that is, until last week when it was reported that Musk changed his mind.

Top execs leave

Two high-profile executives — Drew Baglino, Tesla’s SVP of Powertrain and Energy, and Rohan Patel, VP of Public Policy and Business Development — also left the company.

Patel told TechCrunch he decided Sunday evening to leave Tesla because of “[b]ig overall changes” at the company. Patel, who had been engaging regularly with Tesla customers and fans on X in recent months, declined to be specific. He noted in a message that it would be “better for me not to speculate. … Tesla is going to be stronger than ever, and change is good,” he added.

Baglino told TechCrunch that after 18 years, it was time to leave Tesla. “I feel good about the impact I’ve been able to achieve, my leadership team is strong, the energy businesses I’m responsible for are doing well, etc.,” he wrote in a message to TechCrunch.

“Baglino was in charge of powerdrives and new battery projects, and there’s a sense that there isn’t a whole lot of innovation that’s sustainable at this point, which is probably why Baglino is leaving,” Sandeep Rao, head of research at London-based financial services company Leverage Shares, theorized in an interview with TechCrunch.

Baglino’s departure comes just a few months after Tesla’s previous CFO, Zachary Kirkhorn, stepped down. In January, Musk posted on X, formerly Twitter, that he would want to have around 25% voting control of Tesla in order to focus more fully on the company, rather than on his other companies, and help the EV maker become a leader in AI and robotics.

This article was updated to include information from a regulatory filing that refers to the layoffs as a “restructuring.”




Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Exclusive: Dripos raises $11M Series A to replace Square, Toast and 8 other pieces of software

April 24, 2024 10:01 PM0


Small coffee shops that relied on foot traffic were thrown for a loop when the global pandemic kept people in their homes. That’s when many coffee shop owners turned to technology to help them take online orders and payments.

Startups were also eager to help these businesses stay safely in business — and venture capital followed. For example, Joe Coffee raised some funding to help coffee shops take mobile orders, and Odeko and Cloosiv merged to combine their inventory and mobile-ordering apps. As a combined entity, Odeko subsequently raised tens of millions of dollars in venture-backed funding.

When Jack Pawlik and Avery Durrant founded New York-based coffee shop software company Dripos in 2019, they didn’t know they would soon be joining this group. The pair’s initial idea was to help local coffee shops build mobile ordering apps, similar to what Starbucks offers.

“The more we interacted with operators and shop owners, the more we realized that there was just a much bigger problem going on,” Pawlik told TechCrunch exclusively. “We were almost adding to that problem by being that kind of platform.”

Dripos co-founders and co-CEOs Avery Durrant and Jack Pawlik. Image Credits: Dripos

Through the conversations with shop owners, Pawlik and Durrant learned that many were using a simple point-of-sale system, like Square. It wasn’t bad, necessarily, but not “meant exactly for their workflow,” Pawlik said. Many shops then employed five to 10 other pieces of software to fill in the gaps.

Pawlik and Durrant decided to pivot and build a tool that would replace Square, Toast and those eight other pieces of software with one comprehensive tool.

Dripos brings together point-of-sale; mobile payments; employee management and payroll; loyalty and marketing automation; and administrative functions like accounting and banking.

Manny Caral, owner and operator of Revolucion Coffee + Juice with five locations in Texas, recently switched his locations to Dripos and said in a statement that Revolucion was one of those companies using five different things, including Toast and Square.

“We are able to achieve this and even much more through Dripos,” Caral said. “The product has allowed us to streamline our day-to-day operations and give us time back to focus more on our customer experience.”

Blank Street cracked the code on making coffee shops attractive to VC

Dripos’ approach has caught on with other customers as well. Last year was the company’s first full year with the new tool; it now has a presence in coffee shops across 46 states. The number of locations relying on Dripos increased 400%, and the company processes hundreds of millions in annual payments.

Now the company wants to invest in areas like technology development and go-to-market, so Pawlik and Durrant secured $11 million in Series A funding. Early-stage venture capital firm Base10 Partners, known for investments in Plaid, Instacart and Figma, led the round and was joined by a group of angel investors, including Y Combinator managing partner Michael Siebel, Punchh founder Shyam Rao and Bench founder Ian Crosby. In total, the company has raised $17.3 million.

As part of the investment, Base10 principal Caroline Broder, who led the Series A, joins the Dripos board.

“We have full conviction in this business model,” Broder told TechCrunch. “In the very beginning of our relationship, it was very clear that Jack and Avery had this vision of building a full suite. They built a ton of products to be able to come in and replace things like software early in the company’s lifecycle. They understand what these business owners want and need and what they’re not getting. Then they built something that’s very specifically made for them. That customer empathy is a rare quality.”

B Capital leads Odeko’s $53M Series D to help small coffee shops scale


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

With Easel, ex-Snap researchers are building the next-generation Bitmoji thanks to AI | TechCrunch

April 24, 2024 12:22 AM0


Easel is a new startup that sits at the intersection of the generative AI and social trends, founded by two former employees at Snap. The company has been working on an app that lets you create images of yourself and your friends doing cool things directly from your favorite iMessage conversations.

There’s a reason why I mentioned that the co-founders previously worked at Snap before founding Easel. While Snap may never reach the scale of Instagram or TikTok, it has arguably been the most innovative social company since social apps started taking over smartphone home screens.

Before Apple made augmented reality and virtual reality cool again, Snap blazed the AR trail with lenses. Even if you never really used Snapchat, chances are you’ve played around with goofy lenses on your phone or using someone else’s phone. The feature has had a massive cultural impact.

Similarly, before Meta tried to make virtual avatars cool again with massive investments in Horizon Worlds and the company’s Reality Labs division, Snap made a curious move when it acquired Bitmoji back in 2016. At the time, people thought the ability to create a virtual avatar and use it to communicate with your friends was just a fad. Now, with Memojis in iMessage and FaceTime, and Meta avatars also popping up in Meta’s apps, virtual avatars have become a fun, innovative way to express yourself.

“I was at Snap for five years. Before that, I was at Stanford. I moved down to LA to join Snap in Bobby Murphy’s research team, where we kind of worked on a range of futuristic things,” Easel co-founder and CEO Rajan Vaish told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. He co-founded Easel with Sven Kratz, who was a senior research engineer at Snap.

But this team was dissolved in 2022 as part of Snap’s various rounds of layoffs. The duo used the opportunity to bounce back and keep innovating — but outside of Snap.

AI as a personal communication vector

Easel is using generative AI to let users create Bitmoji-style stickers of themselves drinking coffee, chilling at the beach, riding a bicycle — anything you want as long as it can be described and generated by an AI model.

When you first start using Easel, you capture a few seconds of your face so that the company can create a personal AI model and use it to generate stickers. Easel is currently using Stable Diffusion‘s technology to create images. The fact that you can generate images with your own face in them is both a bit uncanny but also much more engaging than an average AI-generated image.

“Once you give your photos, we start training on our servers. And then we create an AI avatar model for you. We now know what your face looks like, how your hair looks like, etc.,” Vaish said.

But Easel isn’t just an image generation product. It’s a multiplayer experience that lives in your conversations. The startup has opted to integrate Easel into the native iOS Messages app so that you don’t have to move to a new platform, and create a new social graph, just to swap funny personal stickers.

Instead, sending an Easel sticker works just like sending an image via iMessage. On the receiving end, when you tap on the image, it opens up Easel on top of your conversation. This way, your friends can also install Easel and remix your stickers. This is one of the key features behind Bitmoji, too, as you can create scenes with both you and your friend in the stickers, amping up the virality.

Image Credits: Easel

Easel allows users to create more highly customized personal stickers than Bitmoji. Say, for example, you want a sticker that shows you’ll soon be drinking cocktails with your buddies in Paris. You could use a generic cocktail-drinking Bitmoji — but it won’t look like Paris. (And you’ve already seen this Bitmoji many times before.) Whereas, with Easel — and thanks to generative AI — you get to design the background scenes, locations and scenarios where your personal avatar appears.

Finally, Easel users can also share stickers to the app’s public feed to inspire others. This can create a sort of seasonality within the app as you might see a lot of firework stickers around July 4, for instance. It’s also a laid-back use case for Easel, as you can scroll until you find a sticker you like, tap “remix” and send a similar sticker (but with your own face) to your friends.

Easel has already secured $2.65 million in funding from Unusual Ventures, f7 Ventures and Corazon Capital, as well as various angel investors, including a few professors from Stanford University.

Now let’s see how well Easel blends into people’s conversations. “We have learned two very unique use cases. One is that there’s a big demographic that is not very comfortable sharing their faces,” said Vaish. “I’m not a selfie person and a lot of people are not. This is allowing them to share what they’re up to in a more visual format.”

“The second one is that Easel allows people to stay in the moment,” he added, pointing out that sometimes you just don’t want to take out your phone and capture the moment. But Easel still enables a form of visual communication after the fact.


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