This latest release, one of many announcements from the Google I/O 2024 developer conference, focuses on improved battery life and other performance improvements, like more efficient workout tracking.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ofcom is investigating OnlyFans for failing to prevent children from accessing pornography through the platform.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It’s been almost one year since Match Group announced the launch of Archer, the online dating giant’s first app for gay, bi, and queer men. Since rolling out to New York last June, Archer has been downloaded more than 685,000 times, according to estimates from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Archer completed its U.S. rollout this past October.
With Match and other online dating companies facing a downturn, Archer’s growth is certainly notable. Match’s last earnings results showed a decline in Tinder paying users, the company’s flagship app and one of the top dating platforms on the market.
However, despite reaching over half a million installs, Archer still has a long way to go before it catches up to heavyweight Grindr, which amassed over 10 million downloads in the past year alone and has a total of 87 million worldwide installs per Sensor Tower data. Another established competitor, Scruff, has more than 17 million all-time mobile app installs.
Unlike its rivals, who have been accused of fostering a toxic hookup culture, Archer has a fresh take on gay online dating and aims to provide a safe space for users. The app incites various safety measures to prevent unwanted behavior, such as integrating AI into its chat feature to auto-blur potential nudity. (Users can still send dick pics through private photo albums, though.) There’s also selfie verification that prevents matches from using blank profiles or headless profile pictures.
“We recognize that there is bad behavior on gay dating apps,” Michael Kaye, Director of Brand Marketing and Communications at Archer, told TechCrunch. “There’s a lot of body shaming, and there’s a lot of racism. And we’re hoping that by requiring every person to verify [their selfie], this will help contribute to a lower rate of bad behavior because there’s really nothing to hide behind.”
Archer also separates casual and serious daters, giving them two different layouts to choose from—Dating Mode, a linear layout for users to like one match at a time, and Hookup Mode, where users can see multiple profiles at once that feature their activity status and whether they’re looking for something casual. According to the company’s findings, 66% of its users are looking for dates and relationships, and 66% are on Archer for dates and hookups.
Additionally, Archer has an array of social features that make it stand out, including the ability to follow users and add interest tags (Harry Potter, Taylor Swift, Peloton, and so on) to their profiles. It recently launched Emoji Reactions, where users can react to a profile with a fun emoji to help break the ice and start a conversation.
In hopes of attracting more users and staying on its upward trajectory, Archer plans to release new features this summer and fall. Knowing that 74% of Archer users are looking for friendships, Kaye revealed to us that it’s prioritizing community-building features, such as the ability to find users by entering tags in the search bar. He also mentioned testing other capabilities that “further help people connect with others who have shared interests and engage in offline activities.” As Kaye previously told us, Archer is working on adding a Stories feature to the app, which would make it more like Instagram.
In addition, Kaye teased the exploration of potential new AI integrations.
“We’re going to continue to explore how we can integrate AI further into the app and create a much more enhanced premium experience for our users… Match Group recently partnered with OpenAI at the beginning of this year, and I am sure we will be working with that soon,” Kaye said.
Like many other businesses, Match has increased its investment in AI, and it plans to spend around $20 to $30 million on the technology in 2024. The company now has a deal with OpenAI and previously experimented with an AI photo selection feature on Tinder.
Digital fraud detection company BioCatch has a new majority shareholder: U.K-based private equity firm, Permira, is acquiring shares in the company “primarily” from existing investors including Bain Capital, Maverick Ventures, and Tech Opportunities, in a secondary market transaction that values BioCatch at $1.3 billion.
Existing shareholders Sapphire Ventures and Macquarie Capital are also increasing their stake in BioCatch, though the firms did not mention by how much. Permira also refused to confirm how much of a majority stake it now has in BioCatch.
This is the second notable private equity deal that’s been announced in the cybersecurity space in less than a week. Thoma Bravo last Friday said it was planning to buy Darktrace in a $5 billion deal that would see the U.K. cybersecurity company taken private.
Permira last year acquired a “significant minority stake” in BioCatch in a similar secondary market deal with existing investors, and became the company’s No. 3 shareholder after Bain and Maverick. BioCatch crossed the $1 billion valuation mark at that juncture, according to reports at the time, meaning that investors have hiked their valuation of the Israeli cybersecurity company since then.
Founded in 2011, Tel Aviv-based BioCatch develops technology that helps companies such as banks track users’ online behavior to establish whether a customer is real or a fraudster. This can help identify, for example, bots attempting to gain access to online bank accounts through strategies like “credential stuffing.”
The company has raised well over $200 million to date, including tranches from financial giants such as American Express, HSBC, Barclays, Citi and National Australia Bank.
This most recent deal represents Permira’s biggest known transaction since it took email security firm Mimecast private for $5.8 billion a little over two years ago. Permira says it will use its investment and position as majority shareholder to bring a “growth mindset” to BioCatch, with plans to expand further across Europe.
“Permira has backed the theme of cybersecurity for several years, and within this, online fraud detection, customer identity and access management markets have become a clear focus,” Stefan Dziarski, Permira Growth Opportunities’ partner and co-head, said in a press release. “We have tracked BioCatch with enthusiasm for many years, and now having been a shareholder since early 2023, our conviction in the business, its growth potential, its technology leadership, and its management team continues to grow.”
Oura on Monday announced that its smart ring will be available in select Target stores in the U.S. The deal, which also brings the wearable to the retailer’s site, follows similar announcements with Amazon in March and Best Buy last April.
It’s a good bit of validation for a company that almost singlehandedly legitimatized the smart ring as an alternative form factor to ubiquitous wrist-worn smartwatches and trackers. The retail push has been central to CEO Tom Hale, who took over the role in 2022, as interest in health trackers was on the rise amid the pandemic.
The period also saw high-profile adoptions from sports leagues like the NBA, as the company touted health tracking that could potentially catch COVID-19 infections early. In March 2022, the nine-year-old company announced that it had sold its one-millionth ring.
Target end caps will feature a “unique in-store sizing experience,” with dummy units on display. For those who purchase a $10 sizing kit through Target’s site, the retailer will send along a $10 gift certificate to offset the price.
The Gen 3 rings start at $300, but Oura’s subscription service is where the real revenue comes from. The company faced pushback when it announced that it would require the monthly fee to access certain features, though such criticism doesn’t appear to have had any major negative impact on Oura’s growth.
More validation for the form factor arrived earlier this year, when Samsung announced that it is launching its own fitness ring. The Galaxy Ring is set to hit the market later this year.
Serve Robotics, the Uber and Nvidia-backed sidewalk robot delivery company, debuted publicly on the New York stock exchange Thursday, making it the latest startup to choose going public via a reverse merger as an alternative path to capital needed to fund growth.
The company, which spun out of Uber’s acquisition of Postmates in 2021, hits the Nasdaq under the ticker “SERV” with gross proceeds of roughly $40 million — “prior to deducting underwriting discounts and offering expenses,” per regulatory filings — at a share price of $4.
Serve completed its reverse merger with blank-check company Patricia Acquisition Corp in August 2023, and at the same time secured $30 million in a round led by existing investors Uber, Nvidia and Wavemaker Partners, bringing its total amount raised at the time to $56 million. While Serve’s debut in the public markets comes from a reverse merger and not a SPAC, the two alternate paths to IPO are not too dissimilar. They both provide startups with a faster route to public markets. However, pulling this particular financial lever has its risks, especially if the company is pre-revenue or bringing in very little revenue. We need look no further than the countless fallen autonomous vehicle and electric vehicle companies to determine that this is not a golden ticket to longevity or profitability.
Like any publicly traded company, this path does require financial disclosures that provides information on revenue and profits or losses.
Serve brought in $207,545 in revenue last year, up from $107,819 in 2022, per regulatory filings. That’s at a loss of $1.5 million in 2023 and $1.04 million in 2022. However, Serve Robotics said it’s expecting enormous growth fueled by money generated by going public. Those funds will go towards funding R&D for future generations of robots, manufacturing activities, geographic expansion and general working capital and corporate purposes.
The startup also has some big revenue ambitions. Serve said it aims to generate between $60 million and $80 million in annual revenue, with contribution margins of over 50% and positive cash flow by the end of 2025. The company pointed to recent momentum, including its 25% month-over-month increase in deliveries since 2022 when the startup started delivering for Uber Eats.
Future growth will come from scaling the 100 robots deployed today in Los Angeles to up to 2,000 robots in multiple U.S. cities by the end of next year through a contract with Uber Eats. Serve has also enlisted Magna International as a manufacturing partner. Currently, Serve handles 300 restaurants via the Uber Eats and 7-Eleven platform in LA, but has its eyes on Dallas, San Diego and Vancouver, Canada, according to CEO Ali Kashani.
Serve projects that a big portion of its revenue will come from ads, Kashani told TechCrunch.
“I never thought that I would start a robotics company and then be in the ads business,” said a tired, but excited, Kashani in a phone interview minutes after the bell rang. It’s normal for companies to barely sleep before making their public debut out of a need to finalize all the financials and pure adrenaline. “But it’s great because this can help offset the delivery costs, so everybody wins.”
Kashani said Serve has had a lot of inbound interest for ads on its cute little sidewalk robots. On an annual basis, ad revenue can generate 25% to 50% of Serve’s total revenue, he said.
That’s one of the value propositions Serve has pitched to investors. Serve also says it can tap the rapid progress in AI and robotics to help reduce reliance on cars, because who needs something as small as a burrito delivered in a sedan anyway?
“The tailwind here is that these robots are a lot more scalable than a lot of the alternative approaches we have,” said Kashani. “If you look at a car, it has about 3,000 times more kinetic energy than one of our robots, so just by nature, these are safer… for pedestrians, bikers for everybody else, and I think that’s definitely recognized when we when we talk to cities. So there’s a lot of regulatory momentum, but you also have the fact that there is a shortage of labor. You can see companies in the delivery space are still not necessarily profitable, and they’re looking for ways to bring some mix of automation into their fleets. So we see a lot of interest in in the solution that we’re providing.”
Serve’s robots operate at Level 4 autonomy, meaning they can operate autonomously within certain boundaries and conditions. However, Serve still relies on remote human operators to supervise operations in certain scenarios, like at intersections or if something unexpected happens.
Upon the closing of the merger, Uber held a 16.6% stake and Nvidia an 14.3% stake in Serve, according to regulatory filings. An April filing shows that stake will change to 11.5% and 10.1% respectively once the offering closes, but a Serve spokesperson caveated that those percentages may change given the $4 opening share price.
Sarfraz Maredia, Uber’s vice president of delivery and head of its Americas region, has joined Serve’s board.
Serve Robotics started its life as Postmates X, the robotics division of on-demand delivery company Postmates. The autonomous sidewalk robots started delivering to Postmates customers in multiple Los Angeles neighborhoods in 2018. It started a commercial service in 2020.
Uber acquired Postmates in late 2020 for $2.65 billion. Three months later, Postmates X spun out as an independent company called Serve Robotics. The new name was taken from the autonomous sidewalk delivery bot that was developed and piloted by Postmates.
Founded in 2017, Atoms Lanka Solutions is a provider of IT consulting and software development services. Throughout the company’s history, we have worked with over 160 customers from 5+ countries..
