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Don’t trust that SPAC deck
The continuing saga of Lordstown Motor’s struggles as a public company took a new turn today as the electric truck manufacturer made yet more news. Bad news.
Shares of Lordstown are down sharply today after the company reported in an SEC filing that it does not have enough capital to build and launch its electric truck. Here’s the official verbiage (formatting, bolding: TechCrunch):
Since inception, the Company has been developing its flagship vehicle, the Endurance, an electric full-size pickup truck. The Company’s ability to continue as a going concern is dependent on its ability to complete the development of its electric vehicles, obtain regulatory approval, begin commercial scale production and launch the sale of such vehicles.
The Company believes that its current level of cash and cash equivalents are not sufficient to fund commercial scale production and the launch of sale of such vehicles. These conditions raise substantial doubt regarding our ability to continue as a going concern for a period of at least one year from the date of issuance of these unaudited condensed consolidated financial statements.
Now, companies that are trying to invent the future are more risky than, say, established banking concerns that are generating stable GAAP net income. I’m sure that SpaceX looked dicey at times when it was busy crashing rockets on its way to learning how to land them on drone ships.
But in the case of Lordstown’s admission that it cannot “fund commercial scale production and the launch of sale” of its Endurance pickup are fucking galling.
Why? Because when the company pitched its SPAC-led combination and public debut, it was pretty freaking confident that it would have enough cash to do so.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s an excerpt from Lordstown’s investor deck:
You will note in the “Capital Structure” section that the company claimed that it would not need more funding to go to market.
Now Lordstown is pretty sure it’s going to need more money. If it’s putting the possible need in a filing, it means it.
Here’s what the company may do to solve its problems (formatting, bolding: TechCrunch):
To alleviate these conditions, management is currently evaluating various funding alternatives and may seek to raise additional funds through the issuance of equity, mezzanine or debt securities, through arrangements with strategic partners or through obtaining credit from government or financial institutions.
As we seek additional sources of financing, there can be no assurance that such financing would be available to us on favorable terms or at all. Our ability to obtain additional financing in the debt and equity capital markets is subject to several factors, including market and economic conditions, our performance and investor sentiment with respect to us and our industry.
In other words, the company is going to have to lever itself using debt, or dilute existing shareholders through the sale of equity, and Lordstown can’t promise that it will be able to do either “on favorable terms or at all.”
What we’re seeing here is the difference between SEC filings, which are no-bullshit zones, and SPAC decks, which are business propaganda. Shares of Lordstown fell more than 16% during regular trading, and another 6.9% in after-hours trading, as of the time of writing.
This mess from the company that put out this diagram in its investor deck:
In separate news, TechCrunch received an invite to a media availability to visit Lordstown’s operations in May, which included a note that the company “look[s] forward to opening [its] doors and showing you the latest progress from Lordstown Motors as [it] prepare[s] for the beginning of production in late September.” In a new missive sent today concerning the same event, the production timeline was not present.
So, yeah, maybe don’t trust SPAC decks much, if at all.
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EV startup Fisker sets moonshot goal of making a climate-neutral EV by 2027
Electric vehicle startup Fisker Inc. has set a moonshot goal of creating its first climate-neutral car by 2027.
Fisker has yet to bring a vehicle to market — climate neutral or not — making this an ambitious target. The all-electric Fisker Ocean SUV, which is still on track to go into production in November 2022, will not be climate neutral, according to CEO Henrik Fisker, who laid out the target as part of a broader update Tuesday to investors. Instead, this will be another yet to be announced vehicle.
Henrik Fisker, a serial entrepreneur who rose to fame as the designer behind iconic vehicles like the Aston Martin V8 Vantage, the production launch design of the Aston Martin DB9 and the BMW Z8 roadster, also provided a few other updates during the investor call. He said the Ocean will have an anticipated range of up to 350 miles, beyond the previously estimated 300 miles. The company has received more than 14,000 reservations for the Ocean as of March, according to an annual report distributed to shareholders.
Fisker, which went public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Apollo Global Management Inc. in October at a valuation of $2.9 billion, aims to have four vehicles to market by 2025. One of those, Fisker hinted at Tuesday, could be a luxury vehicle which he called the “UFO” that will use the company’s FM29 platform architecture.
Fisker’s carbon-neutral plan
Other companies across industries have made promises to hit that carbon-neutral goal before. Henrik Fisker emphasized to investors that the company will not purchase carbon offsets to accomplish that climate-neutrality goal. Carbon offsets are credits that companies can purchase to “claim” a reduction in CO2 toward their project or product. Instead, Fisker said they will work with suppliers to develop climate-neutral materials and manufacturing processes.
The company lays out some of its proposed strategies on its website, where it splits the vehicle lifecycle into five phases: upstream sourcing, manufacturing and assembly, logistics, the use phase and end-of-life. For each phase, the company lists a few bullet points, such as localizing manufacturing. Even with these plans, achieving climate neutrality in vehicle production will be extremely difficult. Vehicles use materials and components such as steel that are notoriously hard to decarbonize, for example.
Fisker said that the company’s manufacturing partners have climate-neutral goals of their own, which is true for automotive contract manufacturer Magna Steyr. The company inked a deal with Fisker to exclusively manufacturer the Fisker Ocean in Europe. Magna set a target of climate neutrality for its European operations by 2025 and globally by 2030. Foxconn, Fisker’s other major partner for its second, lower-price vehicle dubbed Project PEAR, also has a net-zero emissions goal, but it is set for the middle of the century.
Moonshot goals such as this one could help push innovation in manufacturing processes and encourage other automakers and suppliers to reach for the same targets. Other automakers such as Polestar and Porsche have all made carbon-neutral promises with deadlines of 2030, while Mercedes has said it will hit that target in 2039.
Fisker does seem to have a plan for how it might be able to recycle or reuse some of its EV batteries once they’re no longer useful in the vehicle. The company plans to extend its leasing program across the entire estimated 15-year lifespan of the vehicle, which would theoretically ensure that Fisker will be in possession of a number of its vehicles when they reach end-of-life.
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Rebranded Toyota Ventures invests $300 million in emerging tech and carbon neutrality
Toyota AI Ventures, Toyota’s standalone venture capital fund, has dropped the “AI” and is reborn as, simply, Toyota Ventures. The fund is commemorating its new identity by investing an additional $300 million in emerging technologies and carbon neutrality via two early-stage funds: the Toyota Ventures Frontier Fund and the Toyota Ventures Climate Fund.
The introduction of these two new funds, each worth $150 million, brings Toyota Ventures’ total assets under management to over $500 million. With the new capital infusion into the Frontier Fund comes an expansion of Toyota Ventures’ core thesis, which previously focused on AI, autonomy, mobility, robotics and the cloud, and now is adding smart cities, digital health, fintech and energy. So while Toyota Ventures’ investment approach isn’t changing, it’s broadening the scope of startups it will consider investing in.
“AI is kind of shrinking as a proportion of everything,” Jim Adler, founding managing director of Toyota Ventures, told TechCrunch. “The first mission of the Frontier Fund has always been to discover what’s next for Toyota. Toyota pivoted to cars in the 1930s, and Toyota will grow to other businesses in the future. Startups are experiments in the marketplace, and this is a way for us to understand and get comfortable with where innovations are coming from.”
Toyota as a global company has more than 370,000 employees that cover a range of business units in which the company at large stands to benefit from investing, such as financial technology. The Frontier Fund is a step outside of mobility. It not only seeks to bring emerging tech to market, but it also wants to bring new innovations onboard, whether as a customer or an acquisition, according to Adler.
“I think the vision of the company really is that machines are here to stay, they amplify the human experience, and Toyota understands how machines amplify humans really well for the benefit of society, which sounds incredibly corny, but the company really believes that,” said Adler.
By that same token, the new Climate Fund seeks to invest in startups that can help Toyota accelerate its goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050. The company has been investing in hydrogen for years, including a recent partnership with Japanese fuel company ENEOS, but it’s open to whatever technology will help achieve carbon neutrality, according to Adler.
“We think renewable energies will play a role,” said Adler. “Hydrogen production, storage distribution and utilization will play a role. We think carbon capture and storage will play a role. We’re not going to get dogmatic about hydrogen because we’ve been at it for decades and maybe things will change. Hydrogen hasn’t been crowdsourced across the startup community because there just wasn’t a market for it, but I think the market may be emerging.”
The fund is accepting online pitches on its website from entrepreneurs seeking early-stage funding. On Thursday, Toyota Ventures also announced it would be expanding its team and working with a new Advisor Network as a resource for founders looking for guidance on anything from product development to diversity and recruitment.
“Toyota Ventures has been an invaluable partner for Boxbot since they invested in our seed round in 2018,” said Austin Oehlerking, co-founder and CEO of Boxbot, in a statement. “They have been instrumental in helping us to navigate complicated, existential challenges on our journey from concept to product/market fit. Jim and the team really understand how corporate venture capital should function in order to successfully partner with startups.”
Adler says he and his team come from an entrepreneurial background, so they understand what it’s like on the other side of the table. Toyota Ventures’ focuses on early-stage startups because that’s where it believes some of the most interesting innovations come from.
“I’m a big believer that early-stage venture capital is a telescope into the future,” said Adler. “I think we can actually find those incredibly valuable innovations that make this all worthwhile.”
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7-Eleven to install 500 EV charging stations by the end of 2022
Convenience stores are ubiquitous — and they sell the vast majority of gas purchased by consumers in the United States. But as more Americans transition to electric vehicles, a major reason people visit convenience stores will disappear.
Industry giant 7-Eleven is looking to capture this growing market of EV drivers. The company said Tuesday it will install 500 direct-current fast charging ports at 250 locations across North America by the end of 2022. These charging stations will be owned and operated by 7-Eleven, as opposed to fuel at its filling stations, which must be purchased from suppliers.
Many charging stations from some of the country’s largest providers, like EVgo, ChargePoint or Tesla’s Supercharger network, are located in a patchwork of parking lots adjacent to shopping malls or retailers like Target. But a major draw of convenience stores like 7-Eleven is that they’re already located in areas adjacent to highways or major roads — so they may have a leg up in attracting drivers.
7-Eleven may have another advantage in choosing to install DC fast chargers as opposed to slower level 2 chargers: The majority of convenience retailers are designed for quick, in-and-out service — around the time it takes to fill a tank of gas. Many don’t offer temperature-controlled places to sit, so a longer charging time would likely pose a problem for drivers. While older EV models are limited by the amount of kilowatt charges they can accept (so the output rate of the charger is inconsequential to how long it takes to charge the battery), newer vehicles can accept a wider range of charging rates.
As charging infrastructure — or lack thereof — remains one of the largest barriers to EV adoption, planned build-outs from mainstream retailers like the one announced by 7-Eleven could help reduce some consumer hesitancy over EVs.
The 500 charging stations will join 7-Eleven’s existing network of 22 charging stations, which are located in 14 stores across four states.
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ChargerHelp co-founder, CEO Kameale C. Terry is heading to TC Sessions: Mobility 2021
Thousands of electric vehicle charging stations will be built around the country over the next decade. ChargerHelp!, founded in January 2020 by Kameale C. Terry and Evette Ellis, wants to make sure they stay up and running.
The idea for the on-demand repair app for EV charging stations came to Terry when she was working at EV Connect, where she held a number of roles including director of programs and head of customer experience. She noticed long wait times to fix non-electrical issues at charging stations due to the industry practice to use electrical contractors.
“When the stations went down we really couldn’t get anyone on site because most of the issues were communication issues, vandalism, firmware updates or swapping out a part — all things that were not electrical,” Terry said in an interview with TechCrunch earlier this year.
After Terry quit her job to start ChargerHelp!, she joined the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, where she developed a first-of-its-kind EV Network Technician Training Curriculum. Shortly after, Terry and Ellis were accepted into Elemental Excelerator’s startup incubator and have landed contracts with major EV charging network providers like EV Connect and SparkCharge.
The company uses a workforce-development approach to hiring, meaning that they only hire in cohorts. Workers receive full training, earn two safety licenses, are guaranteed a wage of $30 an hour and receive shares in the startup, Terry said.
We’re excited to announce that Kameale Terry will be joining us at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021, a one-day virtual event that is scheduled June 9. We’ll be covering a lot of ground with Terry, from how she developed her EV repair curriculum to what she sees in the company’s future.
Each year TechCrunch brings together founders, investors, CEOs and engineers who are working on all things transportation and mobility. If it moves people and packages from Point A to Point B, we cover it. This year’s agenda is filled with leaders in the mobility space who are shaping the future of transportation, from EV charging to autonomous vehicles to urban air taxis.
Among the growing list of speakers are Rimac Automobili founder Mate Rimac, Revel Transit CEO Frank Reig, community organizer, transportation consultant and lawyer Tamika L. Butler and Remix/Via co-founder and CEO Tiffany Chu, who will come together to discuss how (and if) urban mobility can increase equity while still remaining a viable business.
Other guests include Motional’s President and CEO Karl Iagnemma, Aurora co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson, GM‘s VP of Global Innovation Pam Fletcher, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, Joby Aviation founder and CEO JoeBen Bevirt, investor and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (whose special purpose acquisition company just merged with Joby), investors Clara Brenner of Urban Innovation Fund, Quin Garcia of Autotech Ventures and Rachel Holt of Construct Capital, Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson.
We also recently announced a panel dedicated to China’s robotaxi industry, featuring three female leaders from Chinese AV startups: AutoX’s COO Jewel Li, Huan Sun, general manager of Momenta Europe with Momenta, and WeRide’s VP of Finance Jennifer Li.
Don’t wait to book your tickets to TC Sessions: Mobility as prices go up at the door. Grab your passes right now and hear from today’s biggest mobility leaders.
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Goldman Sachs leads $45M investment into auto fintech startup MotoRefi
MotoRefi has raised another $45 million in a round led by Goldman Sachs just five months after investors poured $10 million into the fintech startup to help turbocharge its auto refinancing business.
The startup developed an auto refinancing platform that handles the entire loan process, including finding the best rates, paying off the old lender and re-titling the vehicle. MotoRefi says using its platform saves consumers an average of $100 a month on their car payments, a goal achieved partly because it works directly with lending institutions. The company’s refinancing tools had seen steady growth until the COVID-19 pandemic popped into in higher gear. CEO Kevin Bennett said MotoRefi is on track to issue $1 billion in loans by the end of the year, a fivefold increase from the same period last year.
Bennett said the short timeline between rounds was driven by investor confidence in its metrics, which have continued on to grow at a fast pace, and the basic economics around the business.
“We candidly weren’t planning on raising yet, but they (Goldman Sachs) were comfortable given the relationship we have built and the track record and success of the business, to preempt the round and move that calendar up,” Bennett said.
MotoRefi’s platform is available in 46 states and Washington, DC, with plans to be live in all 50 states by the end of the year. The startup has ramped up hiring to help support that growth. By the first quarter of 2021, it had more than doubled its headcount to 187 employees from the same period last year. Its workforce has now popped to 250 employees. The company has hired several senior-level executives, opened a new headquarters and partnered with SoFi. Goldman Sach’s VP of venture capital and growth equity Jade Mandel has joined MotoRefi’s board.
And Bennett sees plenty of room to grow as consumers seek ways to rebalance their debts. The auto refinance market in the United States is $40 billion. However, overall auto loan debt is $1.3 trillion. With 40 million auto loans originated every year, MotoRefi is promised a consistent flow of potential new customers.
The fresh injection of capital, which included investor IA Capital as well as returning backers Moderne Ventures, Accomplice, Link Ventures, Motley Fool Ventures and CMFG Ventures, will be used to continue to build out its products and services and hire more people. MotoRefi has raised $60 million since its inception in 2016.
Bennett believes the company is now in self-sustaining position.
“Thankfully, we moved beyond the world where we are raising capital and then raising more capital as we run out of capital,” he said. “I think we have a great sustainable business and so we, in some sense runway is infinite, and we are building a great profitable business. That’s not to say that we won’t ever raise again, but it will be based on strategic considerations, as opposed to out of necessity.”
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EV fast charger developer Tritium to go public via SPAC merger at $1.2B valuation
Another day, another mobility SPAC deal. This time, it’s Tritium, a Brisbane-based developer and producer of direct current fast EV chargers that is taking the SPAC path to the public market in a deal valuing the company at $1.2 billion.
Tritium said Wednesday it will be heading to the Nasdaq via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Decarbonization Plus Acquisition Corp. II, or DCRN, though it declined to provide a timeline for when the transaction is expected to close. The transaction is expected to generate gross proceeds of up to $403 million. Tritium will be listed under the ticker “DCFC.”
This particular SPAC deal is unusual in that it does not include private investment in public equity, or PIPE — a fundraising round that typically occurs at the time of the merger and injects more capital into the company.
“We didn’t need a PIPE because DCRN is a more than $400 million SPAC and our shareholder group agreed to a minimum cash closing of just $200 million, which significantly reduces redemption risk,” Tritium CEO Jane Hunter told TechCrunch. “Also, our revenue has grown at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 56% since 2016 as we expand our presence in major markets where we have a significant market share, such as the U.S. and Europe. This revenue growth helps to reduce our reliance upon new funds to implement our growth strategy.”
Founded in 2001, Tritium manufactures charger hardware and software for direct current fast chargers. Its products can recharge an EV battery, adding 20 miles in a minute or 100 miles in five minutes, DPAC II chairman Robert Tichio said during an investors call Wednesday. DC chargers are more costly than alternating current (AC) chargers but they send power to the vehicle much more quickly. Generally, AC chargers are installed at home, where a driver can plug in their vehicle overnight, while DC chargers are more frequently found at public charging stations.
“Drivers will want the experience of public charging to be as close as possible to their current experience at the gas pump — just a few minutes to get enough range to get on with your day,” Hunter said.
Tritium’s largest market is Europe, which composes around 70% of the company’s revenue, followed by North America at 20% and Asia at 10%, Hunter told investors Wednesday. The company will use the capital from the transaction to expand its manufacturing capacity and grow sales.
Demand for public EV charging stations is expected to mushroom over the next two decades alongside the growing market share of EVs. According to analysts Grandview Research, the EV charging infrastructure market was valued at $2 billion in 2020. It is expected to grow by nearly 39% through 2028. President Joe Biden said building out a national EV charging network was a key priority under his proposed $2 trillion infrastructure plan.
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Emotion-detection software startup Affectiva acquired for $73.5M
Smart Eye, the publicly traded Swedish company that supplies driver monitoring systems for a dozen automakers, has acquired emotion-detection software startup Affectiva for $73.5 million in a cash-and-stock deal.
Affectiva, which spun out of the MIT Media Lab in 2009, has developed software that can detect and understand human emotion, which Smart Eye is keen to combine with its own AI-based eye-tracking technology. The companies’ founders see an opportunity to expand beyond driver monitoring systems — tech that is often used in conjunction with advanced driver assistance systems to track and measure awareness — and into the rest of the vehicle. Together, the technology could help them break into the emerging “interior sensing” market, which can be used to monitor the entire cabin of a vehicle and deliver services in response to the occupant’s emotional state.
Under the terms of the deal, $67.5 million will be paid with 2,354,668 new Smart Eye shares, of which 2,015,626 are to be issued upon closing of the transaction. The remaining 339,042 Smart Eye shares will be issued within two years of closing. About $6 million will be paid in cash once the deal closes in June 2021.
Affectiva and Smart Eye were competitors. A meeting at the technology trade show CES in 2020 put the two companies on a path to merge.
“Martin and I realized like, wow, we are on a path to compete with each other — and wouldn’t it be so much better if we joined forces?” Affective co-founder and CEO Dr. Rana el Kaliouby said in an interview Tuesday. “By joining forces, we kind of check all the boxes for what the OEMs are looking for with interior sensing, we leapfrog the competition and we have an opportunity to do this better and faster than we could have done it on our own.”
Boston-based Affectiva brings its emotion-detection software to the deal, which will allow Smart Eye to offer its existing automotive partners a variety of products. Smart Eye helps Affectiva move beyond the development and prototype work and into production contracts. Smart Eye has won 84 production contracts with 13 OEMs, including BMW and GM. Smart Eye, which has offices in Gothenburg, Detroit, Tokyo and Chongqing, China, also has a division that provides research organizations such as NASA with high-fidelity eye tracking systems for human factors research.
Smart Eye founder and CEO Martin Krantz said that European manufacturers building luxury and premium vehicles led the charge for driver monitoring systems.
“We see the same pattern repeating itself now for interior sensing,” Krantz said. “I think a large part of the early contracts will be European premium OEMs such as Mercedes, BMW, Audi, JLR, Porsche.” Krantz added that there are a number of other premium brands it will target in other regions, including Cadillac and Lexus.
The opportunity will initially be in passenger vehicles driven by humans and will eventually expand as greater levels of automated driving enter the market.
Affectiva, which employs 100 people at its offices in Boston and Cairo, also has another business unit that applies its emotio-detection software to media analytics. This division, which will be part of the deal and will operate separately, is profitable, Kaliouby said, noting the software is used by 70% of the world’s largest advertisers to measure and understand emotional responses to media content.
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Everything Google announced at I/O today
This year’s I/O event from Google was heavy on the “we’re building something cool” and light on the “here’s something you can use or buy tomorrow.” But there were also some interesting surprises from the semi-live event held in and around the company’s Mountain View campus. Read on for all the interesting bits.
Android 12 gets a fresh new look and some quality of life features
We’ve known Android 12 was on its way for months, but today was our first real look at the next big change for the world’s most popular operating system. A new look, called Material You (yes), focuses on users, apps, and things like time of day or weather to change the UI’s colors and other aspects dynamically. Some security features like new camera and microphone use indicators are coming, as well as some “private compute core” features that use AI processes on your phone to customize replies and notifications. There’s a beta out today for the adventurous!
Wow, Android powers 3 billion devices now
Subhed says it all (but read more here). Up from 2 billion in 2017.
Smart Canvas smushes Docs, productivity, and video calls together
Millions of people and businesses use Google’s suite of productivity and collaboration tools, but the company felt it would be better if they weren’t so isolated. Now with Smart Canvas you can have a video call as you work on a shared doc together and bring in information and content from your Drive and elsewhere. Looks complicated, but potentially convenient.
AI conversations get more conversational with LaMDA
It’s a little too easy to stump AIs if you go off script, asking something in a way that to you seems normal but to the language model is totally incomprehensible. Google’s LaMDA is a new natural language processing technique that makes conversations with AI models more resilient to unusual or unexpected queries, making it more like a real person and less like a voice interface for a search function. They demonstrated it by showing conversations with anthropomorphized versions of Pluto and a paper airplane. And yes, it was exactly as weird as it sounds.
Google built a futuristic 3D video calling booth
One of the most surprising things at the keynote had to be Project Starline, a high-tech 3D video call setup that uses Google’s previous research and Lytro DNA to show realistic 3D avatars of people on both sides of the system. It’s still experimental but looks very promising.
Wear OS gets a revamp and lots of health-focused apps
Image Credits: Google
Few people want to watch a movie on their smartwatch, but lots of people like to use it to track their steps, meditation, and other health-related practices. Wear OS is getting a bunch of Fitbit DNA infused, with integrated health tracking stuff and a lot of third party apps like Calm and Flo.
Samsung and Google announce a unified smartwatch platform
These two mobile giants have been fast friends in the phone world for years, but when it comes to wearables, they’ve remained rivals. In the face of Apple’s utter dominance in the smartwatch space, however, the two have put aside their differences and announced they’ll work on a “unified platform” so developers can make apps that work on both Tizen and Wear OS.
And they’re working together on foldables too
Apparently Google and Samsung realized that no one is going to buy foldable devices unless they do some really cool things, and that collaboration is the best way forward there. So the two companies will also be working together to improve how folding screens interact with Android.
Android TV hits 80 million devices and adds phone remote
Image Credits: Google
The smart TV space is a competitive one, and after a few starts Google has really made it happen with Android TV, which the company announced had reached 80 million monthly active devices — putting it, Roku, and Amazon (the latter two with around 50 million monthly active accounts) all in the same league. The company also showed off a powerful new phone-based remote app that will (among other things) make putting in passwords way better than using the d-pad on the clicker. Developers will be glad to hear there’s a new Google TV emulator and Firebase Test Lab will have Android TV support.
Your Android phone is now (also) your car key
Well, assuming you have a really new Android device with a UWB chip in it. Google is working with BMW first, and other automakers soon most likely, to make a new method for unlocking the car when you get near it, or exchanging basic commands without the use of a fob or Bluetooth. Why not Bluetooth you ask? Well, Bluetooth is old. UWB is new.
Vertex collects machine learning development tools in one place
Google and its sibling companies are both leaders in AI research and popular platforms for others to do their own AI work. But its machine learning development tools have been a bit scattershot — useful but disconnected. Vertex is a new development platform for enterprise AI that puts many of these tools in one place and integrates closely with optional services and standards.
There’s a new generation of Google’s custom AI chips
Google does a lot of machine learning stuff. Like, a LOT a lot. So they are constantly working to make better, more efficient computing hardware to handle the massive processing load these AI systems create. TPUv4 is the latest, twice as fast as the old ones, and will soon be packaged into 4,096-strong pods. Why 4,096 and not an even 4,000? The same reason any other number exists in computing: powers of 2.
And they’re powering some new Photos features including one that’s horrifying
NO THANK YOU
Google Photos is a great service, and the company is trying to leverage the huge library of shots most users have to find patterns like “selfies with the family on the couch” and “traveling with my lucky hat” as fun ways to dive back into the archives. Great! But they’re also taking two photos taken a second apart and having an AI hallucinate what comes between them, leading to a truly weird looking form of motion that shoots deep, deep into the uncanny valley, from which hopefully it shall never emerge.
Forget your password? Googlebot to the rescue
Google’s “AI makes a hair appointment for you” service Duplex didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but the company has found a new way to apply it. If you forget your password, Duplex will automatically fill in your old password, pick a new one and let you copy it before submitting it to the site, all by interacting with the website’s normal reset interface. It’s only going to work on Twitter and a handful of other sites via Chrome for now, but hey, if it happens to you a lot, maybe it’ll save you some trouble.
Enter the Shopping Graph
Image Credits: Google I/O 2021
The aged among our readers may remember Froogle, Google’s ill-fated shopping interface. Well, it’s back… kind of. The plan is to include lots of product information, from price to star rating, availability and other info, right in the Google interface when you search for something. It sucks up this information from retail sites, including whether you have something in your cart there. How all this benefits anyone more than Google is hard to imagine, but naturally they’re positioning it as wins all around. Especially for new partner Shopify. (Me, I use DuckDuckGo.)
Flutter cross-platform devkit gets an update
A lot of developers have embraced Google’s Flutter cross-platform UI toolkit. The latest version, announced today, adds some safety settings, performance improvements, and workflow updates. There’s lots more coming, too.
Firebase gets an update too
Popular developer platform Firebase got a bunch of new and updated features as well. Remote Config gets a nice update allowing developers to customize the app experience to individual user types, and App Check provides a basic level of security against external threats. There’s plenty here for devs to chew on.
The next version of Android Studio is Arctic Fox
Image Credits: Google
The beta for the next version of Google’s Android Studio environment is coming soon, and it’s called Arctic Fox. It’s got a brand new UI building toolkit called Jetpack Compose, and a bunch of accessibility testing built in to help developers make their apps more accessible to people with disabilities. Connecting to devices to test on them should be way easier now too. Oh, and there’s going to be a version of Android Studio for Apple Silicon.
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May Mobility’s Edwin Olson and Nina Grooms Lee and Toyota AI Ventures’ Jim Adler on validating your startup idea
When a founder has a work history that includes the name of the parent company of one of their key investors, you probably assume that was one of the first deals to come together. Not so with May Mobility and Toyota AI Ventures, which connected for the company’s second seed round, after May went out and raised its original seed purely on the strength of its own ideas and proposed solutions.
That’s one of the many interesting things we learned from speaking to May Mobility co-founder and CEO Edwin Olson, as well as Chief Product Officer Nina Grooms Lee and Toyota AI Ventures founding partner Jim Adler on an episode of Extra Crunch Live.
Extra Crunch Live goes down every Wednesday at 3 p.m. EDT/noon PDT. Our next episode is with Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire and Vise’s Samir Vasavada, and you can check out the upcoming schedule right here.
Meanwhile, read on for highlights from our chat with Olson, Grooms Lee and Adler, and then stay tuned at the end for a recording of the full session, including our live pitch-off.
A different approach to corporate VC
One thing Adler brought up early in the chat is that Toyota AI Ventures likely takes a different approach than most traditional corporate VCs, which are often thought of as being more incentivized by strategic alignment than by venture-scale returns. Adler says the firm he founded within the automaker’s corporate umbrella actually does behave much more like a traditional VC in some ways than many would assume.
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