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Cruise acquires driverless vehicle startup Voyage to tackle dense urban environments

March 16, 2021 Big Data

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GM-backed Cruise today announced it is acquiring Voyage, following Bloomberg’s early March report of a potential deal. Terms of the buyout weren’t disclosed, but Voyage CEO Oliver Cameron said “key members” of the Voyage team will join Cruise when the purchase is finalized in the coming months. Cameron will take on a new role as vice president of product.

“Voyage’s experience and development of Commander (our self-driving AI), Shield (our collision mitigation system), and Telessist (our novel remote assistance solution) will only supercharge Cruise’s goal of superhuman driving performance,” Cameron wrote in a blog post. “I am thrilled that key members of our Voyage team — particularly those who worked on our third-generation robotaxi — will be able to use their extensive experience in vehicle development to put their stamp on the Cruise Origin, delivering a better and safer future for our roadways.”

Cameron, former VP of product and engineering at online education giant Udacity, founded Voyage in 2017 alongside MacCallister Higgins, an ex-Udacity senior software engineer. The San Francisco, California-based startup targets communities that may have a greater and more imminent need for a network of self-driving cars, particularly retirement villages.

Voyage’s vehicles are adapted Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans that feature sensors and systems from third-party players and the company’s own AI technology. With a team of 60 employees, Voyage shipped three generations of robo-taxis — the G1, G2, and G3 — and signed partnerships with leading companies like FCA, First Transit, Enterprise, and Intact Insurance. Voyage counts a number of retirement communities among its customers, including The Villages in San Jose and The Villages in Florida.

1/ I’m pleased to welcome @OliverCameron & @Voyage to the @Cruise team! Voyage is a nimble and highly capable company that shares our mission to make transportation safer & more accessible, and we’re thrilled that they’re joining us. pic.twitter.com/YhpJEpExSa

— Kyle Vogt (@kvogt) March 15, 2021

The effects of the pandemic, including testing delays, have resulted in consolidation, tabled or canceled launches, and shakeups across the autonomous transportation industry. Ford pushed the unveiling of its self-driving service from 2021 to 2022; Waymo CEO John Krafcik told the New York Times the pandemic delayed work by at least two months; and Amazon acquired driverless car startup Zoox for $ 1.3 billion. According to Boston Consulting Group managing director Brian Collie, broad commercialization of AVs won’t happen before 2025 or 2026 — at least three years later than originally anticipated.

According to Gartner analyst Mike Ramsey, consolidation in the self-driving market is inevitable and necessary. “There still are dozens of players trying to tackle this market from both a technology and an operations standpoint,” he told VentureBeat via email. “Every smaller company gets to a point where they have to decide whether they are able to scale up and invest the resources to grow, change their model altogether to push into a different part of the market, or look to merge with another company.”

PitchBook’s Asad Hussain noted that smaller autonomous vehicle startups like Voyage face steep capital requirements to scale, while big tech-backed self-driving leaders like Cruise have achieved a formidable market position. “Voyage has targeted an attractive market, as the population of retirees is expected to grow significantly over the next few years. Additionally, we believe Voyage’s technology — which is focused on automated vehicles within retirement communities — is an attractive asset for Cruise, which largely focuses on automation in dense urban environments,” Hussain said. “Exposure to more structured environments such as retirement communities should enable Cruise to commercialize faster, as these use cases have much fewer variables and safety hazards compared to dense urban environments.”

Cruise is considered a pack leader in a global market that’s anticipated to hit revenue of $ 173.15 billion by 2023.

Recently, Cruise revealed that it has roughly 1,800 employees working on its self-driving cars, up from 1,000 as of March 2019. The also company claimed a 2.5 times increase in the utilization of its all-electric test vehicles between summer 2019 and early February, an improvement that’s expected to drive down costs.

Cruise is piloting its cars in Scottsdale, Arizona and the Detroit, Michigan metropolitan area. But the bulk of its deployment is concentrated in San Francisco, where it has a permit to test vehicles without safety drivers behind the wheel. Cruise has scaled up rapidly, growing its starting fleet of 30 driverless vehicles to about 130 by June 2017. The company hasn’t disclosed the exact total publicly, but it has 180 self-driving cars registered with California’s DMV, and documents obtained by IEEE Spectrum suggest Cruise plans to deploy as many as 300 test cars around the country.

Building on the progress it has made so far, in 2020 Cruise announced a partnership with DoorDash to pilot food and grocery delivery for select customers in San Francisco. And it’s making progress toward a fourth-generation car called Origin that features automatic doors, rear-seat airbags, and other redundant systems — but no steering wheel.

In May 2018, Cruise announced that SoftBank’s Vision Fund would invest $ 2.25 billion in the company, along with another $ 1.1 billion from GM itself. In October 2018, Honda pledged $ 750 million, to be followed by another $ 2 billion in the next 12 years. And in January, Cruise raised $ 2 billion in an equity round that pushed its valuation up to $ 30 billion and brought Microsoft on as an investor and partner.

But Cruise is burning through cash quickly. GM posted a $ 1 billion loss on Cruise in 2019, up from a $ 728 million loss in 2018.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Delivery startup Refraction AI raises $4.2M to expand service areas

March 9, 2021 Big Data

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Refraction AI, a company developing semi-autonomous delivery robots, today announced that it raised $ 4.2 million in seed funding led by Pillar VC. Refraction says that the proceeds will be used for customer acquisition, geographic expansion, and product development well into the next year.

The worsening COVID-19 health crisis in much of the U.S. seems likely to hasten the adoption of self-guided robots and drones for goods transportation. They require disinfection, which companies like Kiwibot, Starship Technologies, and Postmates are conducting manually with sanitation teams. But in some cases, delivery rovers like Refraction’s could minimize the risk of spreading disease. Recent market reports from Allied Market Research and Infiniti estimate that annual growth in the last-mile delivery sector over the next 10 years will exceed 14%, with the autonomous delivery segment projected to grow at over 24%, from $ 11.9 billion in 2021 to more than $ 84 billion globally by 2031.

Launched in July 2019, Refraction was cofounded by Matt Johnson-Roberson and Ram Vasudevan, both professors at the University of Michigan. Working alongside several retail partners, people within a few-mile radius can have orders delivered by Refraction’s REV-1 robot. After customers order through a dedicated website, Refraction’s employees load the vehicles at the store, and recipients receive text message updates, along with a code to open the robot’s storage compartment when it arrives.

REV-1, which is approximately the size of an electric bicycle and is legally categorized as an ebike, weighs approximately 100 pounds and stands roughly 4 feet tall, including its three wheels. It travels an average 10 to 15 miles per hour with a very short stopping distance, and the compartment holds about six bags of groceries.

$Delivery startup Refraction AI raises $4.2M to expand service areas$

REV-1’s perception system comprises 12 cameras, in addition to redundant radar and ultrasound sensors — a package the company claims costs a fraction of the lidar sensors used in rival rovers. The robot can navigate in inclement weather, including rain and snow, and it doesn’t depend on high-definition maps for navigation.

Prior to a partnership with Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Produce Station, REV-1 had been delivering exclusively from Ann Arbor restaurants, including Miss Kim and Tio’s Mexican Cafe, during lunchtime as part of a three-month pilot. The company charges the restaurant a flat $ 7.50, and Refraction’s over 500 customers pay a portion of that fee if the business chooses. (Tips go directly to Refraction’s partners.)

As of May 2020, Refraction had eight robots running in Ann Arbor, and it expects to have over 20 within the next few weeks. The latest investment brings its total raised to date to over $ 10 million.

“Last-mile delivery is the quintessential example of a sector that is ripe for innovation, owing to a powerful confluence of advancing technology, demographics, social values and consumer models. Conventional approaches have left businesses and consumers with few choices in this new environment as they struggle to keep pace with surging demand — burdened by the costs, regulatory, and logistical challenges of a legacy infrastructure,” Refraction CEO Luke Schneider, who took the helm in fall 2020, said in a press release. “Our platform uses technology that exists today in an innovative way, to get people the things they need, when they need them, where they live. And we’re doing so in a way that reduces business’ costs, makes roads less congested, and eliminates carbon emissions.”

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Facebook acquires messaging marketing automation startup Kustomer

November 30, 2020 Big Data

Facebook today announced it will acquire Kustomer, a New York-based customer relationship management startup, for an undisclosed amount. When the deal closes, Facebook says it will natively integrate Kustomer’s tools with its messaging platforms, including WhatsApp and Messenger, to allow businesses and partners to better manage their communications with users.

For most brands, guiding and tracking customers through every step of their journeys is of critical operational importance. According to a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers report, the number of companies investing in omnichannel experiences has jumped from 20% to 80%, and an Adobe study found that those with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies enjoy 10% year-over-year growth on average and a 25% increase in close rates.

“We’ve witnessed this shift firsthand as every day more than 175 million people contact businesses via WhatsApp. This number is growing because messaging provides a better overall customer experience and drives sales for businesses,” Facebook VP of ads and business products Dan Levy and WhatsApp COO Matt Idema wrote in a blog post. “As businesses adjust to an evolving digital environment, they’re seeking solutions that place people at the center, especially when it comes to communication. Any business knows that when the phone rings, they need to answer it. Increasingly, texts and messages have become just as important as that phone call — and businesses need to adapt.”

AOL and Salesforce veterans Brad Birnbaum and Jeremy Suriel founded Kustomer in 2015, which went on to attract customers including Sweetgreen, Ring, Glossier, Rent the Runway, Away, and Glovo. The company’s platform let clients search, display, and report out-of-the-box on objects like “customers” and “companies,” with tweakable attributes such as orders, feedback scores, shipping, tracking, web events, and more. On the AI side of the equation, Kustomer offered a conversational assistant that collects customer information for human agents and auto-routes conversations.

Kustomer’s workflow and business logic engines supported the creation of conditional, multi-branch flows that enabled each step to use the output of any previous step and to trigger responses based on defined events from internal or third-party systems. From a dashboard, managers could view which agents are working in real time and launch customer satisfaction surveys (or view the results of recent surveys). The dashboard also exposed sentiment to provide a metric for overall customer service effectiveness, and it enabled admins to customize Kustomer’s self-service, customer-facing knowledge base with articles, tutorials, and rich media including videos, PDFs, and other formats.

Last year saw the launch of KustomerIQ, which allowed companies to train AI models to address their unique business needs. The models in question could automatically classify conversations and customer attributes, reading messages between customers and agents using natural language processing techniques.

Prior to the Facebook acquisition, Kustomer raised $ 173.5 million across six fundraising rounds. Earlier this morning, The Wall Street Journal reported that the deal announced today could value the startup at more than $ 1 billion.

Birnbaum, Suriel, and the rest of the Kustomer team will join Facebook once the transaction is approved. Facebook says that Kustomer businesses will continue to own the data that comes from interactions with their customers, but that it eventually expects to host Kustomer data on its infrastructure.

“Once the acquisition closes, we look forward to working closely with Facebook, where we will continue to serve our customers and work with our partners as part of the Facebook family,” Birnbaum wrote in a blog post. “With our complementary capabilities, we will be able to help more people benefit from customer service that is faster, richer and available whenever and however they need it — via phone, email, text, web chat or messaging. In particular, we look forward to enhancing the messaging experience which is one of the fastest growing ways for people and businesses to engage.”

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Autonomous vehicle startup Pony.ai raises $267 million at an over $5.3 billion valuation

November 6, 2020 Big Data

In a sign that enthusiasm for driverless cars hasn’t waned during the pandemic, Pony.ai today announced $ 267 million in new funding. The startup has offices in Guangzhou, China and Fremont, California and has now raised over $ 1 billion at a valuation north of $ 5.3 billion (up from $ 3 billion as of February 2020).

Some experts predict the pandemic will hasten the adoption of autonomous transportation technologies. Despite needing disinfection, driverless cars can potentially minimize the risk of spreading disease. But surveys are mixed, with one from Partners for Automated Vehicle Education showing nearly three in four Americans believe autonomous cars aren’t ready for prime time. Unsurprisingly, Motional disagrees with this assertion, claiming one-fifth of respondents to its Consumer Mobility Report are “more interested” in autonomous vehicles than they were before the pandemic.

Former Baidu chief architect James Peng cofounded Pony.ai in 2016 with Tiancheng Lou, who worked at Google X’s autonomous car project before it was spun off into Waymo. The pair aims to build level 4 autonomous cars — able to operate without human oversight under select conditions, as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers — for “predictable” environments, such as industrial parks, college campuses, and small towns, with a tentative deployment window of several years from now.

Pony’s full-stack hardware platform, PonyAlpha, leverages lidars, radars, and cameras to keep tabs on obstacles up to 200 meters from its self-driving cars. PonyAlpha is the foundation for the company’s fully autonomous trucks and freight delivery solution, which commenced testing in April 2019 and is deployed in test cars within the city limits of Fremont and Beijing (in addition to Guangzhou).

Pony.ai is one of the few companies to have secured an autonomous vehicle testing license in Beijing. In California, it has obtained a robo-taxi operations permit from the California Public Utilities Commission. The only other companies to have secured such a license in California are AutoX, Waymo, and Zoox.

Last October, Pony.ai partnered with Via and Hyundai to launch BotRide, Pony.ai’s second public robo-taxi service after a pilot program (PonyPilot) in Nansha, China. BotRide allowed riders and carpoolers to hail autonomous Hyundai Kona electric SUVs through apps developed with Via, sourcing from a fleet of 10 cars with human safety drivers behind the wheel.

In August, Pony.ai inked an agreement with Bosch to “explore the future of automotive maintenance and repair for autonomous fleets.” Pony.ai and Bosch’s Automotive Aftermarket division in North America plan to develop and test fleet maintenance solutions for commercial robo-taxi programs. Pony.ai says it began piloting a maintenance program with Bosch in the San Francisco Bay Area in early July.

Among other potential advantages, autonomous driving promises the continuous operation of fleets and reduction of downtime. According to a 2017 McKinsey report, robo-taxis could reduce a fleet operator’s total cost of ownership by 30% to 50% compared with private-vehicle ownership and by about 70% compared to shared mobility, significantly disrupting the market. But robo-taxis will need vastly different maintenance infrastructure than cars, in part because they might lack regular monitoring; have only minutes between passengers; and sport expensive, sensitive, and unconventional parts like lidar sensors.

Pony.ai has competition in Daimler, which in summer 2018 obtained a permit from the Chinese government that allows it to test self-driving cars powered by Baidu’s Apollo platform on public roads in Beijing. And startup Optimus Ride built out a small driverless shuttle fleet in Brooklyn. Waymo, which has racked up more than 20 million real-world miles in over 25 cities across the U.S. and billions of simulated miles, in November 2018 became the first company to obtain a driverless car testing permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Rivals include Tesla, Aptiv, May Mobility, Cruise, Aurora, Argo AI, Pronto.ai, and Nuro.

Fortunately for Pony.ai, it has partnerships with Chinese state-owned auto group FAW and GAC Group (a Guangzhou-based automobile maker) to develop level 4 robo-taxi vehicles. It also has a joint collaboration with On Semiconductor to prototype image sensing and processing technologies for machine vision. And Pony.ai has driven over 1.5 million autonomous kilometers (or about 932,056 miles) as of year-end 2019, putting it within striking distance of Yandex (2 million miles) and Baidu (1.8 million miles).

Previous and existing investors in Pony.ai include video game publisher Beijing Kunlun Wanwei, Sequoia Capital China, IDG Capital, and Legend Capital. The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board’s Teachers’ Innovation Platform led this latest round, with participation from Fidelity China Special Situations PLC, 5Y Capital, ClearVue Partners, Eight Roads, and others.

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Data privacy startup Mine raises $9.5 million and expands to the U.S.

October 21, 2020 Big Data

Mine, which is developing a platform that helps discover and manage personal data on the web, today closed a $ 9.5 million funding round led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture firm. The cash infusion comes as Mine prepares to launch in the U.S. following debuts in Israel and Europe earlier in the year. According to a spokesperson, 100,000 people have used Mine’s app to send over 1.3 million data-reclaim requests to more than 150,000 companies to date.

A majority of people in the U.S. (60%) believe their online and offline activities are being tracked and monitored by companies and the government with some regularity, according to a Pew Research Center survey. It’s a sentiment reflected in reports like PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Consumer Intelligence Series, which found that only 10% of consumers felt they had complete control over their personal information.

Mine’s technology discovers companies that are holding data by analyzing email subject lines, as opposed to the actual content of emails (e.g., “Welcome to Facebook” or “Your Amazon Receipt”). Once connected with an inbox, Mine maps all companies a user has interacted with via email, generating visualizations that show the type of data collected and the corresponding risk level. A dashboard provides a detailed overview of this data, along with shortcuts to remove the data from services no longer in use.

Mine’s algorithms identify companies most likely to have collected personal data based on the sender and the number of times they appear in an inbox. (According to Mine, almost 90% of traces can be found through email subject lines.) The platform independently locates and scans these companies’ privacy policies and data structures to determine what kinds of information they’re collecting from users.

An initial scan takes about 30 seconds, after which the system continues in the background. Mine sends a notification and an email once the audit is completed, and the app continuously provides updates about new traces of companies in a footprint. Mine claims users typically have a 40% cleaner footprint by the end of a session. The company also claims 15,000 Mine users have narrowly avoided data breaches since 2018 by deleting their data right before the breach occurred.

Mine, which has offices in Tel Aviv and New York, is free to use in 10 languages for Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft Outlook accounts, though the company plans to eventually charge a subscription fee. For now, it will focus on products that enable businesses to automatically process “right-to-be-forgotten” requests, helping people demand the deletion of certain data pertaining to them. In May 2018, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) codified right-to-be-forgotten protections into law. This was followed in January 2020 by the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which similarly requires that people be able to access and delete certain data.

“Having been part of the tech world from different angles, I noticed how people, myself included, started to lose trust in how companies are collecting and treating personal data. My cofounders and I created Mine to do what we know best — use technology as a solution to shape a new future of equal choice and control to the internet,” CEO Gal Ringel told VenureBeat via email. “Our smart non-intrusive AI makes it easy for people to take back ownership of their online data and minimize digital risks without changing their online behavior.”

Mine’s Gradient Ventures-led round included participation from E.ventures, MassMutual Ventures, and existing investors Battery Ventures and Saban Ventures. It brings the company’s total raised to over $ 12.5 million.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Via acquires delivery logistics startup Fleetonomy to bolster fulfillment with AI

October 1, 2020 Big Data

In a move to expand its business into the logistics and delivery segment, ride-hailing startup Via today announced that it acquired Fleetonomy for an undisclosed sum. Via, which says it plans to apply Fleetonomy’s expertise in demand prediction and fleet utilization to support fully integrated, digitally powered logistics solutions, says the pandemic has highlighted the growing need for essential services and goods delivery.

Tel Aviv-based Fleetonomy, which was founded in 2017 by CEO Israel Duanis and CTO Lior Gerenstein, taps AI to analyze data and deliver insights with the goal of maximizing inventory and promoting proactive maintenance. The company provides white label ride-sharing and on-demand car subscription services that can accommodate semiautonomous and autonomous fleets. With Fleetonomy’s cloud-based suite of tools, managers can simulate services before deploying cars on the road, adjusting for factors such as fleet size, parking, charging locations, demand, and more.

“As we continue to build the next generation of public transportation and delivery infrastructure, we are proud to partner with Fleetonomy to step into this new phase of growth,” Via cofounders Daniel Ramot and Oren Shoval said in a statement. “We have been consistently impressed by Israel, Lior, and the entire Fleetonomy team, and by the beautifully designed and exceptionally engineered products they have created. We share a vision for the future of mobility and look forward to realizing this vision together.”

Prior to the acquisition, Fleetonomy raised $ 3 million in a seed round led by Vertex Ventures, with participation from Kardan Ventures and VectoIQ.

“Today is a very exciting milestone for our company,” Duanis said. “When Lior and I founded Fleetonomy three years ago, we had a very big mission in mind — to provide a new way of managing fleet based services … In the past three years, with the incredible Fleetonomy team and partners along the way, we’ve been very lucky to see this mission turn to reality with customers such as Toyota, Jaguar Land Rover, Audi, and other top players in the mobility space. By joining Via, we will be able to expand and extend this mission and work together on Via’s great vision of changing the landscape of transportation.”

The logistics market is an increasingly attractive investment for companies like Via. Even pre-pandemic, last-mile delivery was fast becoming the most expensive part of the supply chain, with research firm Capgemini pegging the percentage of costs at 41%.

That no doubt factored into Via’s calculation, which faces an uphill battle as the pandemic rages on around the world. In March, Via suspended shared rides in areas like New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco, a blow to its shared-ride business consumer model. A report from Edison Trends found that spending on ridesharing plummeted around 21% in the seven-day period ending March 16; Via competitor Uber said gross bookings on rides were down 75% in the three months through June, and Lyft previously said that April ridership was down 75% from April 2019.

Via — which has raised $ 500 million in venture capital to date at a $ 2.25 billion valuation — first launched in New York City in 2013, but it’s now deployed globally in more than 70 cities in 20 countries, operating in Europe as ViaVan in partnership with Mercedes-Benz Vans. As of March, the company says it has provided over 70 million rides, up from 50 million as of July 2019. And Via works with more than 150 partners across municipalities, public transit agencies, transportation operators, corporations, schools, and universities to optimize their transport systems, such as the city of West Sacramento, the Los Angeles Metro, Transport for London, Sydney’s Transport for New South Wales, and the New York City Department of Education.

Via’s ride-sharing app and service tap AI to combine multiple passengers or packages headed in the same direction in real time, ostensibly reducing urban congestion and emissions while providing a lower-cost mobility service. Shared rides are usually from corner-to-corner, requiring passengers to walk to a nearby pickup point indicated on the app.

Last year, Via announced the debut of a driverless shuttle program in New South Wales, Australia, in partnership with the BusBot project, local bus operator Busways, local government agency Transport for New South Wales, and startup EasyMile. More recently, the company launched an on-demand transportation pilot in Sacramento, California, that let customers hail rides from apps and the city’s public transportation department. Just this month, Via unveiled in Edmonton what it claims will be Canada’s largest on-demand transit service, with over 60 shuttles that will connect commuters and residents to transit hubs across the city starting in mid-2021. And in the U.K., Via was awarded a multimillion-dollar grant by Innovate U.K., Britain’s innovation agency, to develop a platform that supports local partners as they optimize emergency and last-mile delivery efforts.

Ramot has said that the end goal for Via is an initial public offering. It’s unclear when that might happen.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Amazon acquires autonomous vehicle startup Zoox

June 28, 2020 Big Data

Amazon today announced it is acquiring Zoox, a startup developing autonomous vehicle systems aimed at ride-hailing applications. Neither company disclosed terms of the deal, but according to the Information and the Financial Times, the purchase price is over $ 1.2 billion.

It’s Amazon’s biggest bet yet on autonomous technologies — whether vehicular, aeronautic, or industrial. Last February, Amazon contributed to driverless car and truck startup Aurora’s $ 530 million series B round. In March 2012, Amazon acquired warehouse robotics startup Kiva Systems for $ 775 million.

With Zoox, Amazon — which delivers more than 10 billion items worldwide each year — is looking to cut costs. Analysts at Morgan Stanley estimate self-driving technology could save the tech giant over $ 20 billion a year on shipping as it becomes a formidable competitor to companies like UPS, DHL, and FedEx. By 2023, Amazon is expected to spend $ 90 billion on logistics, expanding its truck trailer, ocean freighter, last-mile delivery van, and cargo jet networks.

“Zoox is working to imagine, invent, and design a world-class autonomous ride-hailing experience,” said Amazon global consumer CEO Jeff Wilke in a statement. “Like Amazon, Zoox is passionate about innovation and about its customers, and we’re excited to help the talented Zoox team to bring their vision to reality in the years ahead.”

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The story so far

Zoox was founded in 2014 by Australian artist-designer Tim Kentley Klay and Jesse Levinson, son of Apple chair Arthur D. Levinson, who was developing self-driving technology at Stanford. In December 2018, Zoox was first to gain approval to provide driverless transport services to the public in California. And in January 2019, the company appointed former Intel chief strategy officer Aicha Evans CEO, signaling a shift in priorities from conceptualization to commercialization.

Foster City, California-based Zoox had raised over $ 990 million in venture capital at a multibillion-dollar valuation, and it appeared to be making progress toward a commercial launch before live testing of its level 3 vehicles ground to a halt during the pandemic. The company recently announced it would begin deploying its autonomous Highlanders in Las Vegas. It has a permit from the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles to transport passengers autonomously and has submitted documents to the California DMV showing its 58 vehicles drove 67,015 autonomous miles in 2019 in San Francisco.

Zoox had hoped to move beyond retrofitted Highlanders to fully custom cars that could be summoned by customers via a smartphone app. The roughly BMW i3-sized electric vehicles would have used cameras and four lidar sensors for perception, with each one covering 270 degrees. The vehicles were also designed with four-wheel steering, active four-wheel suspension, dual power trains, and dual batteries with a combined capacity larger than that of most single-car batteries today.

The idea was to reduce congestion through fleet management and to minimize trips back to base stations for charging overnight. Zoox’s shuttle-like car — which was fully driverless — was designed to operate in a shared fleet in order to maximize efficiency and cut down on ride trip times.

The focus on efficiency likely appealed to Amazon’s newfound conservationist sensibilities. In February 2019, Amazon led a $ 700 million funding round in Rivian, a Michigan-based startup developing electric pickup trucks, which Amazon claims will save an estimated 4 million metric tons of carbon per year by 2030. Amazon plans to have 10,000 of Rivian’s vehicles making on-the-road deliveries as early as 2022 and 100,000 vehicles on the road by 2040.

Plans

According to Amazon, Zoox founders Evans (CEO) and Levinson (CTO) will continue to lead Zoox as a standalone business, and Amazon will help “bring their vision of autonomous ride-hailing to reality.” Amazon gave little away in terms of how it will leverage the technology. It could convert Zoox’s planned robo-taxis into automated delivery vans further down the road, a task it certainly has the expertise to pull off. According to Reuters, Amazon holds more than 210 transportation-related patents, including a 2017 patent to provide on-demand transportation services through a network of autonomous vehicles.

Zoox previously said it was demonstrating its vehicle to partners and insiders behind closed doors, but the next phase of its deployment plans remain unclear. A few months ago, Zoox reportedly laid off 10% of its 1,000-person workforce days after letting go of 120 contract workers, moves it blamed on the economic fallout from the pandemic. It also said it would pay Tesla an undisclosed amount of monetary damages and undergo an audit to settle a trade secret theft lawsuit filed last year in which Tesla claimed some former employees brought proprietary information to Zoox.

According to the Information, a majority of Zoox investors — among them Lux Capital, DFJ, Primavera Capital, and Atlassian cofounder Michael Cannon-Brooks’ Grok Ventures — will see a return from the purchase. Still, the reported $ 1 billion price tag supports the notion that autonomous vehicle development remains expensive. Ford and Volkswagen partner Argo AI recently closed a $ 2.6 billion round at a $ 7.25 billion valuation. In May, Didi Chuxing’s self-driving unit nabbed $ 500 million, led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. And in March, Waymo managed to secure a $ 750 million extension, bringing its first external round to $ 3 billion.

The race has taken on greater urgency as the pandemic roils the economy. While startups like Gatik, Optimus Ride, TuSimple, and Nuro have escaped the worst of it so far, well-financed ventures — including Cruise, Kodiak Robotics, and Ike — have shed hundreds of employees collectively.

Analysts predict the health crisis and its effects will result in consolidation, tabled or canceled launches, and shakeups across the autonomous transportation industry. In something of a case in point, Ford pushed the unveiling of its self-driving service from 2021 to 2022, and Waymo CEO John Krafcik told the New York Times the pandemic delayed work by at least two months.

According to Boston Consulting Group’s Brian Collie, broad commercialization of AVs won’t happen before 2025 or 2026 — at least three years later than originally anticipated.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

ACLU sues facial recognition startup Clearview AI for privacy and safety violations

May 29, 2020 Big Data

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a group of organizations filed a lawsuit against Clearview AI today in an Illinois court alleging privacy and safety violations and asserting that Clearview “will end privacy as we know it if it isn’t stopped.” According to ACLU vs Clearview AI court filings, the startup violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, or BIPA, to create its facial recognition system.

“If allowed, Clearview will destroy our rights to anonymity and privacy — and the safety and security that both bring. People can change their names and addresses to shield their whereabouts and identities from individuals who seek to harm them, but they can’t change their faces,” the ACLU said in a statement accompanying the lawsuit.

The court filing goes on to call facial recognition in general technology that poses a severe risk to privacy and safety. The ACLU has been a direct supporter of a string of facial recognition bans put into effect last year in cities like San Francisco and Somerville, Massachusetts near Boston.

“The capture and storage of faceprints leaves people vulnerable to data breaches and identity theft,” the filing reads. “It can also lead to unwanted tracking and invasive surveillance by making it possible to instantaneously identify everyone at a protest or political rally, a house of worship, a domestic violence shelter, an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and more. And, because the common link is an individual’s face, a faceprint can also be used to aggregate countless additional facts about them, gathered from social media and professional profiles, photos posted by others, and government IDs.”

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Clearview AI has been a target of privacy advocates since January when the New York Times reported a story with the headline “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy As We Know It.” The story alleges that Clearview AI scraped more than 3 billion images from social media websites and the web without people’s consent to train its facial recognition system. Clearview has previously claimed its data gathering methods are protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. A data breach in February also called Clearview AI’s data security practices into question, and company security practices can result in a BIPA violation.

Clearview AI has attracted controversy for reasons beyond data privacy. Huffington Post reporting in April revealed connections between CEO Hoan Ton-That and a number of white supremacists, far-right groups, and Trump-affiliated elites. Earlier this month, Clearview AI pledged to sell its tech exclusively to government and law enforcement agencies following BuzzFeed News reporting in February that found Clearview works with thousands of organizations around the world, including companies like Macy’s and Best Buy.

In other biometric data collection news, BIPA was also used to file a lawsuit last October against Amazon’s Alexa for recording voice data. Illinois lawmakers nearly passed a bill last year requiring consent before recording people who speak with devices like Echo smart speakers, but that effort seemed to fall apart following interference by the Internet Association, a group associated with tech giants like Amazon and Google.

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Intel acquires urban mobility startup Moovit for $900 million

May 4, 2020 Big Data

Intel has confirmed that it’s buying Israeli urban mobility startup Moovit, in a deal worth $ 900 million. Reports of the impending acquisition were first published by local Israeli publication Calcalist on Sunday, and in a press release today, Intel noted that it was buying Ness Ziona-based Moovit to help make Mobileye a “complete mobility provider,” which will eventually include driverless taxi services.

Chip giant Intel has a recent track record of acquiring Israeli startups. Just a few months back it paid around $ 2 billion for Habana Labs, which develops programmable AI and machine learning accelerators for datacenters. But back in 2017, Intel doled out an eye-popping $ 15.3 billion for Mobileye, a computer vision firm specializing in autonomous cars. Mobileye’s advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) are currently used in 60 million vehicles, and as the technology moves further toward full autonomy, Moovit’s arsenal of data will help Mobileye turn on “cost- and demand-optimized driverless” car services.

When the deal closes, Moovit will become part of the Mobileye business but will continue to operate under its own brand and run its existing partnerships. It’s also worth noting that Intel had previously invested in Moovit via its venture capital arm Intel Capital, meaning that the value of the acquisition is actually pegged at $ 840 million, net of Intel Capital equity gain.

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Founded in 2012, Moovit is best known for its consumer-facing app that’s used by more than 40 million active users globally to see the best ways to traverse a city using a combination of transport options, and even includes nifty augmented reality (AR) directions. However, the company has pivoted its core business to focus on licensing its back-end platform to third parties through a “mobility-as-a-service” (MaaS) offering. Through this, Moovit provides municipalities with data and analytics to improve city transport infrastructure, while corporations such as TomTom and Microsoft also leverage Moovit’s data to offer third-party developer access to real-time transport data to include in their own apps.

Intel acquires urban mobility startup Moovit for $900 million

Above: NYC: Moovit’s AR-powered “way finder” feature

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The value here for a company like Intel and its Mobileye subsidiary is data, which Moovit aggregates from myriad transit partners and corporations, as well as from its 40 million active users who generate more than 6 billion data points each day around traffic flow and user demand. Mobileye has made no secret of its plans for so-called “robotaxis,” and Moovit’s data will prove vital as it pushes into the driverless MaaS sphere.

Indeed, Intel and Mobileye intend to sell and lease self-driving vehicles for other companies and organizations to operate, while they also plan to deploy their own robotaxi services. But having the technology to operate fleets of driverless vehicles at scale is only part of the picture, and data and “customer-facing infrastructure” will also be required, according to Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua.

In other words, Moovit gives Mobileye the knowledge it needs as it gears up to commercialize autonomous vehicle services in key markets around the world. Through the Moovit mobile app, Mobileye can push its robotaxi services as part of the broader trip planner offering, meaning that a commuter may see that the best way to get to their office is to take a driverless taxi from their home to the station two miles away, and then get a train the rest of the way.

The timing of Intel’s acquisition is notable, as it comes during a period of great uncertainty for companies such as Moovit — the global COVID-19 crisis has meant that public transport has been in low demand as people have stayed at home. Moovit itself publishes data regarding the impact of COVID-19 on public transit usage in key cities around the world, showing that it’s down by as much as 80% in some areas.

Above: Moovit data showing decline in public transit during COVID-19

As with other companies during the COVID-19 crisis, Moovit has sought new ways to keep business going. Last month it launched an emergency mobilization platform that makes it easier for transit organizations to redeploy their unused vehicle fleets to create new on-demand transport services for frontline workers. Corporations can also use the platform to arrange dedicated pickup services to get their essential employees safely to their place of work.

It’s not clear what role — if any — the COVID-19 crisis played in Moovit’s decision to sell now, but under the wings of a tech behemoth such as Intel, Moovit can worry just that little bit less about revenues in the coming months and years as society adjusts to what could become a “new normal” that leans heavily on remote working. The terms of the deal also seem like a decent exit for Moovit, which had raised around $ 131 million since its inception, including the $ 50 million series D cash injection led by Intel Capital in 2018.

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HPE acquires identity management startup Scytale

February 4, 2020 Big Data

HPE today announced that it’s acquired Scytale, a startup providing tools that help engineers build identity-driven and large-scale distributed software, for an undisclosed sum. According to HPE fellow and general manager Dave Husak, cofounders Sunil James, Emiliano Berenbaum, and Andrew Jessup will join HPE, where they’ll develop cryptographic-identity technology that offers customers the ability to design, deploy, and achieve IT operational goals regardless of supplier or location.

“This acquisition … represents HPE’s ongoing transformation, part of which is to embrace and contribute to open source projects … Our goal is to deliver services and products that advance these developments, and provide our customers and partners with the fastest possible path to application modernization,” Husak wrote in a blog post. “It’s my pleasure to welcome this world-class team as they become part of the HPE family. The addition of Scytale’s talent, their expertise, and the power of their community will, without a doubt, accelerate our progress toward [our] goals.”

San Francisco-based Scytale — which raised $ 8 million in venture capital prior to the acquisition — was founded in 2017 by Jessup, Berenbaum, and James alongside a workforce hailing from cloud-native enterprises like Amazon Web Services, Duo Security, Google, Okta, PagerDuty, and Splunk. It’s recognized as the founding contributor of the Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) and the accompanying SPIFFE Runtime Environment, as well as other open source projects to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Scytale has its beginnings in a December 2016 gathering of engineers in Los Gatos, California on zero-trust (ZT) systems. There, a whitepaper pitched SPIFFE, an open ZT standard and toolchain that makes service identity ubiquitously available.

SPIFFE was first released in December 2017, after which the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) adopted the project. Since then, technologies such as Istio, Consul, Network Service Mesh, and more have incorporated SPIFFE, and organizations like Bloomberg, ByteDance, Huawei, Pinterest, Square, TransferWise, and Uber have committed significant resources to the project. Today, SPIFFE is used to authenticate to public clouds like Amazon Web Services, or databases like MongoDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

“Scytale’s DNA is security, distributed systems, and open-source. Under HPE, Scytale will continue to help steward SPIFFE. Our ever-growing and vocal community will lead us,” James wrote in a press release. “We’ll toil to maintain this transparent and vendor-neutral project, which will be fundamental in HPE’s plans to deliver a dynamic, open, and secure edge-to-cloud platform.”

HPE’s latest acquisition comes after the tech giant’s purchases of Cape Networks, Cray, and Plexxi, which similarly offer solutions to tackle hybrid and multi-cloud connectivity. In June, HPE CEO Antonio Neri pledged that all of the company’s products will be available as services by 2022, including subscription-based software and on-premises infrastructure that customers rent in a pay-per-use model.

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