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Ethiopian plastic upcycling startup Kubik gets fresh funding, plans to license out its tech | TechCrunch

April 29, 2024 11:40 AM0


Kubik, a plastic upcycling startup, has raised a $1.9 million seed extension, months after announcing initial equity investment. The startup’s latest investment is from African Renaissance Partners, an East African venture capital firm; Endgame Capital, an investor with a bias for technologies around climate change; and King Philanthropies, a climate and extreme poverty investor.

The fresh capital comes as the startup scales its operations in Ethiopia following the launch of its factory in Addis Ababa, where it is turning plastic waste into interlocking building materials like bricks, columns, beams and jambs. Kubik co-founder and CEO Kidus Asfaw, told TechCrunch that the startup intends to double down on its operations in Addis Ababa, as it lays ground for pan-African growth from 2025.

Kubik’s approach involves upcycling plastic waste into “low-carbon, durable, and affordable” building materials using proprietary technology, which Asfaw says they will out-license for faster pan-African, and the eventual global growth.

“What we want to do is solve problems for cities and so, we’re thinking about our business model being truly circular. The way we’ve set up our business strategy, is that now we’re in the focus phase of proving this model here in Ethiopia. We’ll expand it to a few more markets to prove the diversity of the context in which this business model can work. But over time, what we actually want to do is transition to becoming a company that’s licensing out this technology,” said Asfaw, who co-founded Kubik with Penda Marre in 2021.

“That’s how we feel that we can truly scale. It’s not by having factories all over the world, but having this industry adopt a new way of making materials globally,” he said.

He said their product allows developers to erect walls without the need for cement, aggregates or steel, making the construction faster and bringing the cost down by “at least 40% less per square meter”. Cost is a key barrier in construction and the availability of affordable or cheaper building materials presents a better option for developers of affordable-housing projects.

Asfaw said Kubik’s materials have passed safety tests by the European standards agency, Intertek, which checked, among other things, strength, toxicity and flammability.

“We don’t want to be selling something that’s harmful for human beings. We did not start sales until these reports were available,” he said.

The startup currently recycles 5,000 kilograms (and can do 45,000 at capacity) of plastic waste a day. It has signed partnerships with corporates and Addis Ababa municipality for a regular supply of plastic waste. In the near-term, it is looking at product diversification to cover pavers and flooring material.

It is estimated that the world produces 430 million tonnes of plastic a year, two thirds are for short-term use. Evidently, the world is choking on plastic waste, and while the situation is exacerbated by consumerism trends in developed countries, in regions facing rapid urbanization and economic growth like African cities, plastic waste is getting out of control too, requiring urgent responses. In the coming days, startups like Kubik will play a leading role in providing sustainable solutions for the menace.

African climate startups set to gain ground as VC funding shifts their way


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London's first defense tech hackathon brings Ukraine war closer to the city's startups | TechCrunch

April 28, 2024 4:23 PM0


Last week, the UK announced its largest ever military support package for Ukraine. The bill takes the U.K.’s total support for this financial year to £3 billion — not quite the $50 billion the US pledged recently, but still substantial.

But while most of those funds will be spent on very traditional military hardware, a new tech initiative launched last weekend was aimed at enhancing Ukraine’s asymmetric warfare capabilities against Russia. In fact, the London Defense Tech Hackathon was the first-ever event to bring together some of the UK’s brightest minds in technology, venture capital, and national security in a military setting. The idea was to hack together ideas to both assist Ukraine and also to create a far more porous layer between the worlds of fast-paced civilian tech and the very different world of the military. 

Put together by Alex Fitzgerald of Skyral and Richard Pass of Future Forces, the two were joined by co-organizers that included the Honourable Artillery Company,  Apollo Defense, Lambda Automata and D3 VC among others.

The event brought together developers skilled in both hardware and software to foster innovation in defense, national security, and deeptech. There was a key focus on drones and their applications on the battlefield, both the hardware and the electronic systems needed to fly them to their targets and counter-drone systems. 

As most observers of the war have pointed out, this war has taken on a completely new dimension compared to previous wars. Today, drones and electronic countermeasures are the order of the day, as Ukraine has endeavored to fight off Russia, a much larger aggressor, with asymmetric methods. 

Fitzgerald told me: “There are three groups of people coming to these events. There’s the builders, investors, and the military. I think for everyone, it’s trying to convince their colleagues to think more about defense technology as an option to either build or invest in.”

He explained that there were two main tracks of work: electronic warfare and drone or aerial systems: “There’s an acronym I learned from someone cleverer than me, which is that the future of defense technologies comes small, cheap  and uncrewed.”

He explained that one main aim was to get people who had traditionally not been involved in defense either building for or investing in defense: “We’ve got people like the NATO Innovation Fund, the UK National Security Strategic Investment Fund. So yeah, it’s a mix of people who already invest in defense or who haven’t thought about investing before.”

He chose the hackathon format because “the focus is on getting stuff done. Get actual builders, not to just talk about building, because that’s actually where most of the innovation is happening.”

One of the inspirations for the event was the recent El Segundo, Calif., defense tech hackathon in February of this year.

“I think the key thing with military technology is making it as easy to use and as powerful as some of the the consumer technology that’s been built,” said Fitzgerald “There’s the classic line, ‘There’s more AI in a snap in Snapchat than there is often some most modern military systems.’” 

Also attending the event was Catarina Buchatskiy, representing Apollo Defense.  As engineers pored over cameras, Starlinks, and drones, she told me: “Defense tech is a difficult industry to enter. And it’s a difficult market to break into, for obvious reasons. We’ve found Hackathons an extremely exciting way for people to get involved because defense technology can seem like a giant black box of contracts that take 10 years, and technologies that are built [are often] hidden from the public eye. At a hackathon, you have 24 hours. Make something really cool.”

 

Interceptor done

She said the firm had seen “a lot of success” with the El Segundo event.  

“We just realized that if people think it’s something that’s accessible to them [and] can do something quickly and make an impact, they want to participate,” she told me.

Buchatskiy, who is Ukrainian, also spoke powerfully about Ukraine: “These are very real things to me. When I say that I need a drone detector, it’s because I’m looking at one outside my window that we didn’t detect in time and it is going to kill my neighbor. That is the reality that we face.”

She added that it’s important for hackathon attendees to know “that they’re building for someone and this could actually save my family’s life.”

Despite the controversy surrounding defense technology in some quarters, she added, “To be involved in technology is to be interested in a better future. And I really, truly can’t think of a more interesting and better future than one that’s safe and one where we can guarantee peace.”

NATO, in the shape of the NATO Investment Fund, a fund with a billion euros to invest in defense tech over the next few years, was also represented. 

Fund partner Patrick Schneider-Sikorsky told me the fund was set up to back startups “that bolster our collective defense security and resilience. We invest in dual-use deep tech, but the fund was conceived before the war in Ukraine. The conflict has now very much impacted our investment thesis and we’re keen to invest in defense technologies that can make Europe safer and more secure.”

But why was NATO funding a hackathon?

“I think defense tech is new to a lot of a lot of founders and a lot of developers,” Schneider-Sikorsky said. “It’s not that easy for them to understand the problem statements and the challenges and also to get access to the end users.”

He said the hackathon format particularly lends itself to that: “It would normally, for many founders, take them months if not years to get in touch with the right people at defense ministries, and a lot of them are here today. So hopefully it will accelerate things substantially.”

Another attending investor, Alex Flamant from HCVC, told me: “There was a need for people in Europe to invest in proper defense technologies. It seemed from the investor standpoint, there’s restrictions around certain investors investing. One of the goals of this is to demystify what a lot of this is amongst young builders, and really to get people more aligned with the big mission that we’re all on.”

Machine learning specialist was there to focus on drone detection: “That’s in our machine vision and object detection knowledge. Ukraine are fighting for the whole of Europe at the moment and obviously the UK is pivotal to that. It’s essential that we that we ally with them and utilize what we have to help.”

The hackthon came at a time of increased tension around the use of technologies in defense. 

Google recently fired 28 employees after their sit-in protest over the controversial Project Nimbus contract with Israel, for instance.

However, defense is clearly rising up the tech agenda.

Anduril recently moved ahead in a Pentagon program to develop unmanned fighter jets, and more broadly as we learned last year, venture capital is opening the gates for defense tech. 

And in the UK, there is much talk about how high-powered lasers could be among the next wave of weapons. The DragonFire weapon is said to be precise enough to hit a £1 coin from a kilometre away, according to the MoD, and cost barely $15 to fire. 

The projects to emerge from the hackathon may not have been not quite so sci-fi, but they were pretty damn close. How about a “High Speed Interceptor to take down Orlan Drones”? And at least they are likely to be deployed a lot sooner than a laser gun. 

 




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Givebutter is turning a profit making tech for nonprofits | TechCrunch

April 27, 2024 9:45 PM0


Givebutter started in a George Washington University dorm room in 2016 as a software solution to make nonprofit fundraising more transparent and fun. Eight years later, the company is profitable and it just raised $50 million to scale as momentum for nonprofit-focused startups appears to be growing.

The company’s co-founder and CEO, Max Friedman, fundraised for a variety of organizations in college, ranging from raising for GW’s Greek life to raising for national nonprofits like TAMID. Friedman told TechCrunch that regardless of the size or scope of the organization he was fundraising for, they all had the same problem: They all used a disjointed mix of one-solution tech software that didn’t really make the process better and often came with hidden fees.

“We realized that nonprofits are using a lot of different tools to solve different pain points, and what we can do for the sector is bringing it all under one roof,” Friedman said. “It exists in restaurants and in e-commerce; there [was] no Shopify or Toast for nonprofits.”

The result was Givebutter, a CRM platform for nonprofits that strives to be transparent and all-encompassing. It features marketing resources, ways to track donors, fundraising tools for a variety of different strategies, and payment processing. Nonprofits can either use Givebutter for free, if their fundraising campaigns offer a place for users to donate to Givebutter, or organizations pay a 1% to 5% platform fee.

“From day one, we had customers,” Friedman said. “It was very clear that there was a lot of demand for great fundraising tools and not a great tool set for those change makers.”

The startup raised $50 million from Bessemer’s Venture Partner’s BVP Forge Fund with participation from Ardent Venture Partners this week. Friedman said the money will be used for marketing to help the startup scale as the company has grown to this size thus far largely with almost zero marketing spend.

What initially got me interested in this deal — beyond the fact that the company is profitable from a largely donation-based revenue system or the fact that it calls its employees “Butter Slices” — was that it was a sizable round in the nonprofit tech sector, which has been popping up significantly more as of late.

During the most recent YC Demo Day, two startups, Givefront and Aidy, were building tech for nonprofits. While these companies weren’t the first nonprofit-flavored startups to ever go through YC, they are some of the first to be building software for the nonprofits; many past YC companies in the space are nonprofits themselves, and Givefront and Aidy absolutely stood out in this year’s AI- and dev-tool-dominated cohort.

I asked Friedman if it felt like momentum in this category had changed since he got started eight years ago, and Friedman said it definitely has and that the timing is right for this category. There has been a lot of recent consolidation in the space, especially regarding private equity-backed nonprofit software players like Bloomerang and Bonterra, each of which has made a handful of acquisitions in the last few years alone. This leads to higher fees and many nonprofits looking for less-expensive solutions, Friedman said. Once people get interested in the sector, he said, they often realize how big the potential market is.

In 2022, Americans donated nearly $500 billion to charity, according to the National Philanthropic Trust, down 3.4% from 2021. There are more than 1.5 million nonprofits and growing, and building to even get a slice of that market could provide a huge windfall. Givebutter is a good example of this. The company works with more than 35,000 nonprofits and has processed more than $1 billion in donations, but it is still barely making a dent in the overall nonprofit industry.

“We have about 1% market share,” Friedman said. “That’s amazing. I’m really proud of that, but I’m also like there are 99% of nonprofits out there that can benefit, and a big part of why we raised was to go do that.”

Givebutter might just start to run into more competition on the way. “Nonprofits are incredibly resilient,” Friedman said. “There [have] been downturns and upturns in the economy for a number of years and nonprofits have grown. Nonprofits also solve some of the world’s largest problems. I’m happy to see more people being aware of that and investing in that.”


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The all-electric Mercedes G-Class ratchets up the tech and off-road capability | TechCrunch

April 24, 2024 8:17 AM0


The Mercedes-Benz G-Class — the rugged off-road powerhouse that launched in 1979 and has since become a brutalist status symbol — has gone electric. This is, in many ways, Mercedes’ most prestigious car, a model more prized for its presence and exclusivity than its power and capability. Going electric, then, is more than an historic moment for the iconic Gelandewagen; it is the biggest test yet for the company’s recently scaled back electrification plans.

Mercedes’ approach to electrifying the prestigious SUV suggests the German automaker understands the stakes. The first electric version of the G-Class not only meets but beats its internally combusted counterparts in terms of power and off-road capability. What is surprising is the name.

Meet the Mercedes-Benz G 580 with EQ Technology. That’s right, not the EQG, breaking the pattern set out by all-electric predecessors like the EQS, EQE and EQB. Starting with the G-Class, all new battery electric Mercedes models will fit into the company’s traditional alphabetic taxonomy.

That’s a significant change from a branding standpoint, but it makes sense when you look at the thing. The electric G shares a substantial amount with its internally combusted predecessors. If Mercedes wanted to break that trend and integrate the EVs into the traditional model nomenclature, this is the place.

Nuts and bolts

Image Credits: Mercedes

Like the other Gs, the G 580 is still built on a traditional ladder frame, a common layout in trucks and purpose-built off-roaders. Likewise, it still uses a solid axle out back, again preferred by serious denizens of the trails. The electric G does make a concession to modernity with an independent front suspension setup, but that’s also just like the other current G-Class flavors.

Perhaps more importantly, it looks almost indistinguishable from the upcoming 2025 refresh of the G-Class. Mercedes made a few subtle tweaks to the styling, most notable being a black grille plus some distinctive, EQ-exclusive lighting. There are other changes such as slightly rounded corners and the like to let this SUV’s abrupt shape cut through the wind more cleanly, but they’re near-impossible to spot.

Take one look, though, and it’s easy to see that aerodynamics is not the priority here. Off-road performance is, and Mercedes has gone all-out, creating a bespoke drivetrain for the G-Class.

A bet on off roading

Mercedes-Benz G580 with EQ Technology in desert sand non-metallic paint. Image credits: Mercedes

This is where things get radically different from the various gasoline-powered G-Class models.

Like the higher-spec models of Rivian’s R1T and R1S, the G-Class is driven by four electric motors — one for each wheel — mounted inboard on the SUV’s chassis. Each of these motors even has its own two-speed transmission, a selectable reduction gearset that allows the EQ flavor of the G-Class to have a low-range mode, giving it extra torque and control in low-grip scenarios.

A four-motor setup gives precise control over individual wheel speed, enabling better grip management than a traditional locking differential setup could manage. It creates the opportunity for some fun tricks, too.

The hallmark is what Mercedes calls the G-Turn. Tap a few buttons on the center console, hold either the left or right paddle on the steering wheel, and then step on the accelerator, and the G-Class spins about on its axis.

It’ll do up to two complete rotations like this, just enough for a bit of showboating, but Mercedes says it’s actually for making a quick exit from unexpectedly terminated trails, something again seen earlier from Rivian.

Another, more practical feature is called G-Cornering, where the G-Class can reduce the speed of the inside rear wheels when turning. This will help the G-Class navigate tight, twisty trails far more efficiently than a typical off-roader with locking differentials.

Crucially, neither of these features is available on the G-Class models with internal combustion engines. If you want them, you’ll have to go electric; and the extra capabilities don’t end there.

The EQ G-Class can wade through water 33.5 inches deep, about six full inches deeper than the other Gs. It also offers an extra 0.3 inches of ground clearance and an additional degree of approach angle.

A hot EV in a tepid-demand world

Image Credits: Mercedes

If you’re worried about ruggedness, Mercedes-Benz says you shouldn’t be. The G 580 with EQ Technology has metal and carbon fiber protection around the 116-kilowatt-hour battery pack. It’s also fully isolated from water, dirt and whatever other muck you run it through. It’s not, however, made using the silicon-anode technology from Mercedes’ partnership with Sila. Those are due to arrive in a “range-extended” version of the electric G within the next few years, according to a Mercedes-Benz spokesperson.

It may prove to be a desirable option. Despite offering 16 kWh greater capacity than a Model X, for example, the electric G won’t go nearly as far on a charge as the Tesla. Mercedes says it’ll do 473 kilometers on the European WLTP cycle, which should equate to roughly 250 miles on the American EPA test, far short of the Model X’s 335-mile EPA rating.

Despite the range, the electric G-Class sounds like an impressive package, enough to woo any true fan of performance away from the models with internal combustion. Tragically, it launches at a time of cooling interest for EVs in general.

Mercedes-Benz recently walked back its 2030 goal of being an EV-only manufacturer, blaming difficult market conditions.

Ahead of the G 580’s unveiling, Britta Seeger, Member of the Board of Management of Mercedes-Benz Group AG, said that interest in EVs is heavily variable based on region In Europe. Adoption has recently taken a huge hit thanks to the sudden removal of EV-related incentives, she added.

This has caused “a little bit of uncertainty” among the brand’s customers. “And obviously, if you turn off incentives, it has an immediate impact,” Seeger continued.

In Europe, Mercedes has covered this by applying its own incentives, with “promising” results, according to Seeger. In the U.S. the “lease loophole” means many of the brand’s EVs still receive the $7,500 federal incentive so long as they are leased, while dealers here are often piling on steep discounts of their own.

“For the U.S., we do see people who are very much interested, but I would say the majority are more hesitant.”

She says the company is sticking to its electrification plans but declined to set any specific sales targets for the G 580 with EQ Technology versus the other G-Class trims with internal combustion. “We are prepared for everything… We have complete flexibility in responding to customer needs,” she said.

In other words, we’ll have to wait and see how much of a factor the G 580 with EQ Technology is in the overall spread of G-Class sales. Unless it’s a total flop, though, it’s reasonable to expect more.

Mercedes has thus far made higher-horsepower, higher-price AMG-branded versions of its electric EQE and EQS models. In the U.S., the AMG version of the traditional G-Class outsells its lower-cost versions, despite carrying a nearly $200,000 starting price — plus whatever exorbitant adjustment your local dealer wants to apply.

That is why Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius calls the G-Class “the Birkin bag of our product portfolio.” Will the new EQ flavor maintain its cachet? It certainly looks ready to drive circles around its predecessors off-road, but whether that’s enough to woo the fickle G crowd remains to be seen.


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Ibotta’s IPO opens sharply higher, hinting at warming public-market interest in tech shares | TechCrunch

April 19, 2024 12:01 AM0


Ibotta began it’s path as a public company on Thursday by opening at $117 per share, a big increase from its IPO price of $88, itself an increase from its proposed range of $76 to $84 per share.

And this pop is despite boosting the size of its offering earlier in the week, with existing shareholders expanding their sale by just under one million shares.

Shares are not continuing to climb in early trading, but are holding steady above its IPO price, at around $100 at the time of writing.

The company left money on the table “for investors who are very bullish on it [expanding] its third-party platform beyond just Walmart,” which has become a key partner for Ibotta and represents much of its current revenue, said Nicholas Smith, a senior research analyst at pre-IPO research company Renaissance Capital. Given that its started trading far above its IPO price today, some critics may argue that it left too much money on the table, and could have raised more for itself.

Its successful debut marks the third major tech IPO in the United States this year, and is the third in a row to price well and immediately trade higher. It is also the first half of a pair of technology offerings that will list this month, with data management and security company Rubrik expected to list its own shares next week. The two companies follow Reddit and Astera Labs out of the private markets, after both the social media company and datacenter connectivity hardware play continue to trade above their IPO prices.

Investor eagerness for Ibotta indicates that “there is an increasing appetite for IPOs again” Smith said, “particularly in the tech space.”

Don’t pop the champagne yet for the tech IPO market coming roaring back, however. Ibotta pivoted to business sales over a direct-to-consumer model, which helped it reach profitability in recent periods. Classic tech IPOs tend to feature tech companies still in growth mode and deeply in the red.

Rubrik could be a better test of IPO appetite. Its products are in the data management and security worlds, and the company is deeply unprofitable and growing more slowly than Ibotta. That said, it does have a strong cloud revenue story to tell. If its debut goes well, we could see more yet-unprofitable unicorns try a shot at the public markets. 

Smith agrees, calling the upcoming Rubrik IPO “an even bigger test” for tech debuts “given its weaker current financial picture.”

We’ll find out next week.


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Trellis Climate aims to bridge the 'commercial valley of death' for climate tech | TechCrunch

April 18, 2024 4:44 PM0


Let’s say you’re a founder who started a company that’s based on a breakthrough technology which can make hydrogen cheaper and faster than anyone else — so much faster and cheaper that you sailed through your first several rounds of fundraising, bringing in tens of millions of dollars to prove it works. And it does, even better than expected.

Now all you have to do is build a commercial scale plant, the so-called first-of-a-kind facility. Some call it the “commercial valley of death,” and it’s the point at which many climate tech startups struggle. Because no one has undertaken a project like that before, the usual financiers tend to balk; there are too many unknowns.

Climate nonprofit Prime Coalition is hoping to bridge the valley with a new program, Trellis Climate.

Prime Coalition has long taken a different tack to climate finance compared to its for-profit brethren. It makes the usual venture-style investments in startups through its Prime Impact Fund and also helps philanthropists direct their money to climate-related projects that it deems high impact. Trellis Climate follows the latter model with a focus on middle stages, where capital has grown scarce.

“There are more and more philanthropists that are really interested in solving the climate problem,” Lara Pierpoint, director of Trellis Climate, told TechCrunch.

“The highest, best use of philanthropy is in trying new ideas, in really swinging for the fences on the things that have a very high impact potential,” she added. “It is the most flexible and potentially risk-forward set of dollars that are out there.”

For founders in climate tech, that sort of funding is likely welcome news. Early stage founders have a wide range of capital to tap, from numerous venture capital funds to federal grants. It might not be enough to keep the planet from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, but so far it has been enough to prime the pump and keep climate tech investors busy.

There has been an assumption that once climate technologies have been proven, “then corporations and industry would scale those technologies,” Pierpoint said. “On the corporate side, a lot of companies are really getting pushed to do the things that create immediate shareholder value.” As a result, there’s a widening gap in the middle.

“We strongly believe that philanthropy is the catalyst, but that the goal is to bring in infrastructure investors that are willing to lean forward a little bit on risk,” she said.

The program’s first investments include Ample Carbon, a startup that converts old coal plants to bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, and Ebb Carbon, a marine-based carbon removal startup.


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Inversion Space will test its space-based delivery tech in October | TechCrunch

April 17, 2024 7:55 PM0


Inversion Space is aptly named. The three-year-old startup’s primary concern is not getting things to space, but bringing them back — transforming the ultimate high ground into “a transportation layer for Earth.”

The company’s plan — ultra-fast, on-demand deliveries to anywhere on Earth — sounds like pie in the sky, but it’s the sort of moonshot goal that could transform terrestrial cargo transportation. The aim is to send up fleets of earth-orbiting vehicles that will be able to shoot back to Earth at Mach speeds, slow with specially-made parachutes, and deliver cargo in minutes.

Inversion has developed a pathfinder vehicle, called Ray, that’s a technical precursor to a larger platform that will debut in 2026. Ray will head to space this October, on SpaceX’s Transporter-12 ride share mission, paving the way for Inversion’s future plans on orbit (and back).

Ray is small — about twice the diameter of a standard frisbee — and will spend anywhere from one and five weeks in space, depending on factors like weather and how the orbit aligns with the landing site, Inversion CEO Justin Fiaschetti explained in a recent interview.

This first mission will have three phases: the initial on-orbit phase, where the spacecraft will power on, charge its batteries, and hopefully send telemetry to the ground. During the second phase, Ray will use its onboard propulsion system to slow down the vehicle so it starts losing altitude and reentering the atmosphere. The reentry capsule will separate from the satellite bus (both designed in-house), with the latter structure burning up.

The third and final phase will see Ray slow down using a supersonic drogue parachute, from a reentry speed of Mach 1.8 to Mach 0.2. The main parachute will then deploy, further slowing the capsule to a soft splashdown off the coast of California.

Impressively, the company has designed and built almost all of the Ray vehicle in-house, from the propulsion system to the structure to the parachutes. This last component is key: almost no space company designs parachutes themselves, and they’re incredibly challenging to engineer from the ground up. Inversion’s engineering team completed qualification testing of the deployment and parachute systems last year.

Fiaschetti said strong vertical integration has helped the company move so quickly.

“The purpose of our Ray vehicle is to develop technology for our next-gen vehicle. As such, we’ve built basically the entire vehicle in-house,” Fiaschetti said. “What we saw was that if we can build in-house now, do the hard thing first, that allows us to scale very quickly and meet our customer needs.”

The reentry vehicle is totally passive — meaning it doesn’t have active controls to navigate its reentry to Earth — but the company’s larger next-gen vehicle, called Arc, will have “football field-level” accuracy.

Inversion was founded by CEO Justin Fiaschetti and CTO Austin Briggs in 2021, but the two go back further: they met for the first time when they sat next to each other at a Boston University freshman matriculation ceremony. The pair eventually got jobs in southern California — Briggs, as a propulsion development engineer at ABL Space Systems, while Fiaschetti had brief engineering stints at Relativity and SpaceX — and they were actually roommates when they first floated the idea of developing technology to deliver cargo anywhere on Earth.

The company went through Y Combinator in the summer of 2021 (it was one of our favorites from the cohort) and closed its $10 million seed round in November that same year.

“We’ve been off to the races ever since,” Fiaschetti said. The company’s grown to 25 employees, who are based out of Torrance, California, where they have a 5,000-square-foot facility. The startup also owns five acres of land in the Mojave Desert, where it conducts engine testing. The scaling of the team and this first mission have been entirely financed by that round.

The startup sees promising markets in both government agencies and private companies; both segments could use Inversion’s reusable platform as an on-orbit testbed, or as a delivery vehicle to a private commercial space station. Inversion is aiming on pushing both reusability and duration-on-orbit “to the maximum” to bring down costs and also to support different mission profiles, Fiaschetti said.

Inversion aims to fly the next-gen vehicle, Arc, for the first time in 2026. While the two cofounders declined to provide more details on the spacecraft, the company’s website says it will be capable of carrying over 150 kilograms of cargo, to provide “proliferated” delivery in space.

“We are testing hardware consistently. We’re developing an infrastructure to be able to scale ourselves. Just as our decision to bring parachutes in house was a decision because the parachutes are so directly applicable to what we’re building, it’s making those kinds of key decisions that allows us to move move much faster than another reentry vehicle would take much longer to develop.”




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Consumer tech investing is still hot for Maven Ventures, securing $60M for Fund IV | TechCrunch

April 16, 2024 9:37 PM0


When prolific venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Lerer Hippeau announced in early 2024 they were pivoting away from consumer tech, it sparked a social media debate about whether there are still opportunities.

Maven Ventures’ Jim Scheinman and Sara Deshpande say “yes.” And to prove it, they raised $60 million in capital commitments for a fourth fund to back “massive consumer tech trends.”

They say “massive” because this is the firm that seeded companies like videoconferencing giant Zoom and autonomous vehicle maker Cruise. Scheinman, founding managing partner, is even credited for coming up with the Zoom name.

As to the notion that no one wants to invest in consumer tech anymore, Scheinman told TechCrunch “it’s not true.” Like other sectors, this one also has cycles where consumers either think something is “the coolest thing ever” or “the worst.”

Consumer tech is in the trough of the cycle, Scheinman said. As such, he believes this is the best time to be an investor. “It’s less noisy, and there is a lot less competition as less people try to invest,” he said.

When he started investing, the internet was the first major platform. Then came mobile, then cloud and AWS. Scheinman thought web3 was going to be the next thing, but that was eclipsed by artificial intelligence. Jumping in, Maven will be there helping to build the next game-changing health AI company or robotics AI consumer business, he said.

“This is absolutely the time when multi-billion-dollar companies are born, from now to over the next three to four years,” Scheinman said. “There are dozens of companies that you’ve never heard of that will be household names with the likes of Zoom, Cruise and Facebook. This is the time to invest in it.”

Any new portfolio business will be in good company. Overall, 16% of Maven’s portfolio companies have reached a minimum $500 million exit or valuation, which is 10x industry average, Scheinman and Deshpande, general partner, told TechCrunch.

Scheinman started the firm in 2013 and brought in Deshpande soon after to focus on consumer AI and personalized medicine. They brought in investment partner Robert Ravanshenas in 2015, and again in 2020 after a stint in a startup operating role, to focus on fintech, longevity and consumer AI.

Together the trio remains committed to seeding similar consumer tech trends, including applications of AI, personalized healthcare, climate and sustainability, family technology and fintech.

Fund IV brings total assets under management to $200 million and more than 50 total investments. The firm makes six to eight investments each year, writing average check sizes between $1 million and $1.5 million.

Maven invested in seven new companies so far from the new fund, including Medeloop, a platform to help improve clinical research; Lutra AI, a startup that creates AI workflows from natural language; and AI agent company Multion.

A big theme for this new fund is investing in founders that have unique insight around how this technology can improve life for consumers. In addition, “figuring how, with this new emergence and improvement in AI technology, do we envision that we can actually improve life for consumers all the way to the consumer,” Deshpande said.

“Consumer trends will never go away,” Deshpande said. “Consumers are the spending engine of a healthy economy. We are all consumers. For us, it’s really this knack of being able to see what is changing consumer behavior or a new technology that can massively impact people’s lives. Founders come to us with an amazing vision worth fighting for, and that’s the type of stuff we’re spending a lot of time on right now.”

Consumer tech is bound for a comeback among unicorns, but maybe not just yet




Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

New U.S. ‘green bank’ aims to steer over $160B in capital into climate tech | TechCrunch

April 16, 2024 10:00 AM0


For years, banks have been financing large renewable power projects, from utility-scale solar farms to horizon-spanning wind farms. But smaller projects, like installing a heat pump in someone’s home or retrofitting affordable housing, often get passed over. They simply haven’t been lucrative enough.

But the demand is there, which is why advocates have been clamoring for the federal government to support a so-called green bank, which will underwrite these sorts of projects.

That green bank is now a reality. On Thursday, the EPA announced that it had awarded $20 billion in grants from the Inflation Reduction Act to eight organizations that will use the money to make loans that will help with those projects.

“It’s a chance to prove that this works and creates real benefit on the ground for people across America,” Dawn Lippert, founder and CEO of Elemental Excelerator, told TechCrunch, adding that “tribal communities, rural communities, low income and disadvantaged communities are really the focus here.”

Indeed, over $14 billion of the funding will go toward communities that fit those descriptions, the EPA said.

What’s more, since the money is to be used for loans, it can be recycled once those loans are paid off. Green bank loans have a pretty good track record, too. The Connecticut Green Bank, for example, has a delinquency rate that’s on par with other commercial lenders across both residential and commercial portfolios.

In addition to providing financing for energy upgrades, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, as it is known, is hoping to attract $7 in private capital for every dollar it disperses. In fact, that might be a conservative figure: McKinsey expects the new green bank should attract more than $12 of private investment per dollar on its balance sheet.

The U.S. is expected to need $27 trillion by 2050 to hit net-zero carbon emissions, McKinsey estimates, which might make the green bank’s $20 billion seem small. But its ability to spur private investment and the fact that it’s not a one-time grant should allow it to have an impact that extends beyond its initial bottom line.

Founders and investors should see some benefit, too. Though the money is aimed mostly at consumers and small businesses, equity investments are a possibility, Lippert said. Plus, the funding should juice demand for technologies that have been proven and are ready for commercial deployment.

For those that aren’t yet, the green bank’s loans should have a cascading effect, sending a signal upstream to founders and investors that there are markets for consumer-level climate tech that works for low-income and disadvantaged communities.

“This $20 billion of funding is going to have a really significant impact on creating jobs, reducing costs for American families, creating a healthier, safer future for our children,” Lippert said.


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Robotic Automations

Discover future-ready strategies for staff and tech evolution with Sand Technologies | TechCrunch

April 16, 2024 1:31 AM0


At the upcoming TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 event taking place in Boston on April 25, one session will stand out for early-stage companies seeking to navigate the turbulent waters of tech and staffing strategies. Titled “How to Evolve Your Tech and Staff Strategies for Future Rounds,” the session will be led by Brad Stanton, the managing director of business development at Sand Technologies. Drawing from his extensive experience in consulting and software development with global giants like Dell and Accenture, Stanton will delve into the intricacies of becoming an operational unicorn, not just a commercial one, even in the face of resource constraints.

Stanton’s insights will aim to empower startups to address the perpetual flux in their technical and staffing requirements as they progress through their growth journey. Attendees will discover practical yet impactful strategies to bridge skills gaps, optimize the productivity of small teams, and maintain the agility necessary to swiftly adapt to evolving market and investor expectations. With over 25 years of experience leading high-performing teams across various domains, Stanton will provide actionable takeaways for companies striving to thrive amid uncertainty.

Based in Texas, Stanton specializes in helping companies leverage AI talent and solutions across different regions, including India, LatAm, Eastern Europe, Africa, and the USA. His session at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 will offer invaluable guidance for startups aiming to chart a course toward sustainable growth and success in an ever-changing landscape.

Want to attend this session? Then book your ticket to TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 right now before prices increase at the door.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024? Reach out to our sponsorship sales team by completing this form.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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