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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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Big Data – VentureBeat

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.

The story so far

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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Big Data – VentureBeat

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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Big Data – VentureBeat

Facial recognition startup Megvii files IPO in Hong Kong

August 27, 2019 Big Data

(Reuters) — Chinese AI firm Megvii Technology, backed by Alibaba, has filed in Hong Kong to conduct an IPO targeting proceeds of at least $ 500 million, two people said, just as the city faces political unrest and its first recession in a decade.

Beijing-based Megvii, widely known for facial recognition platform Face++, may raise as much as $ 1 billion in the initial public offering, said one of the people, who expect the share sale in the fourth quarter of the year.

The filing comes as companies postpone or slow down listing plans in a recession-bound city blighted with nearly three months of anti-government protests, and where the benchmark Hang Seng share price index fell to seven-month lows this month.

Reuters reported last week that China’s biggest ecommerce firm, Alibaba Group, had delayed its up to $ 15 billion Hong Kong listing.

Megvii has decided to press ahead with its IPO plans because it has little business in Hong Kong and expects the unrest to ease later this year, said a third person.

Megvii declined to comment. The people who had direct knowledge of the matter declined to be identified as the information was not public yet.

AI leader

Megvii, founded in 2011 by CEO Yin Qi and two friends from Tsinghua University, would become the first Chinese artificial intelligence firm to go public in Hong Kong.

Its filing comes amid government plans for China to become an international leader in AI, a technology that is becoming increasingly central in various sectors.

Once the preserve of researchers, AI has grabbed the attention of businesses as varied as healthcare and financial services looking to use algorithms to comb through troves of data to recognize patterns and solve problems.

In May, Megvii raised $ 750 million from investors including Bank of China Group Investment and Australia’s Macquarie Group at a valuation of slightly over $ 4 billion.

The company, also backed by Ant Financial, provides facial recognition and other AI technology to governments and companies including Alibaba, Ant Financial, Lenovo Group, and Huawei Technologies.

It booked a loss of 3.35 billion yuan ($ 472 million) on revenue of 1.43 billion yuan last year, widening the loss from 759 million yuan a year earlier. Its adjusted operating profit, which excludes one-off items such as share-based compensation payments, reached 75.7 million yuan last year, showed its draft prospectus.

It will use IPO proceeds primarily for research and development, marketing and sales plus global expansion and strategic investments opportunities, the prospectus showed.

Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are joint sponsors of the IPO.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

AI startup Gather uses drones and computer vision for warehouse inventory

August 17, 2019 Big Data

Gather, a company that uses autonomous drones for warehouse inventory, launched out of stealth today. Founded in 2017, the company of about 10 employees is based in Pittsburgh.

Gather’s founding team is made up of Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University graduates, including cofounder and chief robotics officer Sankalp Arora, whose work together with a team at the Office of Naval Research on autonomous helicopters won the 2018 Howard Hughes Award.

Earlier this year, Gather closed a $ 2.5 million funding round to bring its products to market and grow its computer vision and software offerings.

Gather supplies software for the autonomous operation of drones that can connect with existing warehouse management systems and IoT devices such as motion sensors. Computer vision is then used to scan and count inventory.

The solution is about 60% cheaper than traditional methods that rely on people alone, Gather said. Gather software is currently used in an undisclosed number of warehouses, but an air cargo company was able to reduce inventory time from 8 hours to 15 minutes, and take inventory 10x more quickly than two employees with a forklift in another warehouse.

“People never have to leave their desk to go out and do an inventory,” Arora told VentureBeat in a phone interview. “We’re not outfitting these things with any specific hardware. It’s a drone that you can go buy at Best Buy.”

Gather was founded in January 2017 by Arora, Daniel Maturana, Geetesh Dubey, and Robb Myer, an entrepreneur-in-residence at CMU.

Since Gather can connect with IoT devices, drones can deploy anytime a motion sensor is triggered. Arora argues a team of drones can multiply savings for warehouses by eliminating the need to install cameras for security or surveillance.

While drones using Gather’s computer vision can read barcodes and count boxes, an added bonus is providing hourly inventory image sets that warehouse managers can use to assess inventory reports or look back through records.

Cameras are also used to help the drones avoid running into objects.

“Our semantic mapping enables a single camera to map identified objects up to a range of 150 meters,” Arora said. “So what that means is we can follow rules of engagement in these facilities. For example, if a manager tells us ‘I don’t want this drone within 15 meters of a forklift,’ we can make a map these using semantic cues from known objects and map these objects by following rules of engagement.”

Computer vision by companies like Autodesk and Indus.ai are being applied in industrial environments to improve safety and compliance with regulations. Such systems may also play a role in the future to orchestrate the movement of people and machines as more robots enter warehouses. A number of challenges stand in the way of fully autonomous warehouses, Arora said.

“I think a good way to put it is you have to deal with unpredictable decision makers, as well as flexibility of the environment as you are making these things automated. And that is where I guess the final hill for robotics is,” he said. “You’ve got amazing robots making our cars, doing manufacturing on manufacturing lines, but as as soon as the environment becomes dynamic, it changes and you have to interact with humans or you have to be flexible given the environment, then the perception challenges associated with it. And the planning challenge associated with it becomes several orders of magnitude more difficult.”

Recent robotics ramp-ups include Brain Corp’s initiative to bring robots to warehouses and a $ 46 million funding round for Fetch Robotics in June, while DHL introduced a $ 300 million investment last year to quadruple robots in its facilities in North America.

Amazon, who rolled out its new Pegasus sorting robot in June, predicted earlier this year that fully autonomous Amazon warehouses are at least 10 years away.

The $ 2.5 million funding round was led by Expa and joined by Dundee VC, Bling Capital, Comeback Capital, XRC Labs, Summer League Ventures, and Plexo Capital.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Apple acquires self-driving vehicle startup Drive.ai (updated)

June 26, 2019 Big Data

Self-driving car startup Drive.ai will cease all operations and lay off 90 employees, according to a June 12 filing with California’s Employment Development Department that was initially spotted by the San Francisco Chronicle. The news comes after reports that Apple was exploring an acquisition of Drive.ai to bolster the former’s secretive self-driving car project.

Drive.ai general counsel Thomas Yih wrote in the letter that the closure was necessitated “[by] events beyond Drive.ai’s control or current knowledge.” CEO Bijit Halder will be among those out of work when Drive.ai’s Mountain View office shutters on Friday, along with the company’s directors of finance and robotics.

Drive.ai declined to respond to VentureBeat’s request for comment.

In what might be retroactively interpreted as a sign of instability, Drive.ai cofounders Sameep Tandon and Tao Wang left the company in June and February, respectively, according to LinkedIn. Three weeks ago, five other Drive.ai employees — mostly data, systems, and software engineers — changed their LinkedIn profiles to say they left Drive.ai for Apple.

Drive.ai was at one time valued at $ 200 million, and it managed to raise nearly $ 80 million in four years from backers including New Enterprise Associates, GGV Capital, Northern Light Venture Capital, HOF Capital, Nvidia GPU Ventures, and others. Andrew Ng, formerly Baidu’s chief scientist and a researcher at Stanford, once sat on the company’s board of directors.

Drive.ai’s abrupt shutdown comes after it announced it would pull out of Frisco, Texas, one of its launch cities. At the time, it said it was because its contract with Frisco, where Drive.ai has operated a small fleet of autonomous Nissan NV200s shuttles on a single route between an office park and a high-end shopping complex, ended later in the month. (The City of Frisco opted not to renew it, citing high costs.)

That move came months after Drive.ai began piloting its driverless tech in Arlington, Texas.

Drive.ai’s shuttles — each of which was equipped with lidars, radars, GPS, cameras, and inertial measurement sensors that collected data about the outside world, along with onboard computers that interpreted incoming data in near-real time — ferried passengers on routes connecting the Dallas Cowboys stadium, an office park, a convention center, the Texas Rangers ballpark, and the University of Texas at Arlington. They featured screens that displayed symbols, emojis, and other visual cues to communicate their next course of action — a lane change or right turn on red, for example — to human drivers and pedestrians around them.

The vans operated with safety drivers aboard, but Drive.ai had planned to remove humans from the loop by the end of 2021.

Drive.ai’s service was paid for by the City of Arlington and the U.S. federal government and was originally slotted to run through October 2019, with an option to extend. The city requested that it end early, and a spokeswoman for the city told the Chronicle that Drive.ai’s vans dropped off their last passengers on May 31.

Updated 6:27 p.m. Pacific: Apple confirmed to Axios this evening that it acquired Drive.ai for an undisclosed price. A source tells the publication that the Cupertino company hired employees in engineering and product design, and that it additionally purchased Drive.ai’s autonomous cars and related assets.

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Key Tips for Scaling Your Startup from Jason Calacanis

March 31, 2019 NetSuite

Posted by Anthony Stames, Software Industry Marketing Lead

LAUNCH founder Jason Calacanis recently sat down with NetSuite to share what he’s learned over a career in which he’s invested in more than 200 startups, including unicorns like Uber, Thumbtack, Calm.com and Robinhood. Some of his insights are surprisingly counterintuitive, others refreshingly down-to-earth. They’re all expressed in the kind of frank, practical terms that the industry has come to expect from one of its boldest voices.

In the webinar, Calacanis explained what works in the earliest stages of a startup’s existence doesn’t necessarily attract angel investors; what an angel investor sees as a sign of promise might strike a venture capitalist considering a round of Series B financing as a threat to ROI or a negligent investment altogether. Businesses in the startup phase that anticipate these challenges make the best possible case for the kind of financing that drives increased market penetration and valuation.

Here are a few takeaways:

Generate Revenue Right Off the Bat

Calacanis’ first point is the most important: startups should have one business model, and it should include revenue generation from day one. A long-term vision of success is what gets startups off the ground, but Calacanis warns against applying that same long-term thinking to a startup’s business model.

The days are gone when most startups could count on slowly developing a user base before introducing advertising revenue: companies like Uber and Airbnb incorporated revenue generation into their earliest business models and adjusted their revenue streams only as they made commensurate changes to their services and overall business models. In time, a startup may produce strong, reliable revenue streams through subscriptions, advertising and affiliate programs, but it’s unlikely to get anywhere near that point if its founders don’t concentrate on what works best right from the start.

Avoid the Feature Death March

If a startup’s business model should stay simple, so should its approach to product development. Founders are naturally filled with ideas for their flagship products, some of which can be incorporated in beta, others of which need to be held for future releases. And the ideas keep coming as a startup matures. That’s a good thing…right?

Not always. Calacanis notes that most successful startups focus on steady, incremental improvements to core services, not the introduction of flashy new features. A startup’s goal should be to produce deep products and services of narrow scope; this approach tends to set a startup apart from its competition and to cultivate customer loyalty. Developers, who know this phenomenon as Feature Creep, will be happier, too.

Adjust Your Team

It’s an awkward and often painful reality, but the right team for a startup’s bootstrapping phase isn’t the right one for an angel investor. Founding partners who feel right at home in the whack-a-mole flurry of a startup’s early days may not be content with just one role, or even effective in that capacity. And the distinction grows even more stark when rounds of VC move those founders up to managerial roles.

Successful startups are honest about the need for fewer generalists and more specialists as their companies grow. And they become adept, however uncomfortable the process may be, at helping people move on when the time is right. Even when those people helped launch the company from a dorm room.

Hear the rest of Calacanis’s points in his own distinctive voice.

Posted on Mon, March 25, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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