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Battery Resourcers raises $20M to commercialize its recycling-plus-manufacturing operations
Equipment at Battery Resourcers’ new cathode sintering and analysis facility in Novi, Michigan. (Photo: Battery Resourcers)
As a greater share of the transportation market becomes electrified, companies have started to grapple with how to dispose of the thousands of tons of used electric vehicle batteries that are expected to come off the roads by the end of the decade.
Battery Resourcers proposes a seemingly simple solution: recycle them. But the company doesn’t stop there. It’s engineered a “closed loop” process to turn that recycled material into nickel-manganese-cobalt cathodes to sell back to battery manufacturers. It is also developing a process to recover and purify graphite, a material used in anodes, to battery-grade.
Battery Resourcers’ business model has attracted another round of investor attention, this time with a $20 million Series B equity round led by Orbia Ventures, with injections from At One Ventures, TDK Ventures, TRUMPF Venture, Doral Energy-Tech Ventures and InMotion Ventures. Battery Resourcers CEO Mike O’Kronley declined to disclose the company’s new valuation.
The cathode and anode, along with the electrolyzer, are major components of battery architecture, and O’Kronley told TechCrunch it is this recycling-plus-manufacturing process that distinguishes the company from other recyclers.
“When we say that we’re on the verge of revolutionizing this industry, what we are doing is we are making the cathode active material — we’re not just recovering the metals that are in the battery, which a lot of other recyclers are doing,” he said. “We’re recovering those materials, and formulating brand new cathode active material, and also recovering and purifying the graphite active material. So those two active materials will be sold to a battery manufacturer and go right back into the new battery.”
“Other recycling companies, they’re focused on recovering just the metals that are in [batteries]: there’s copper, there’s aluminum, there’s nickel, there’s cobalt. They’re focused on recovering those metals and selling them back as commodities into whatever industry needs those metals,” he added. “And they may or may not go back into a battery.”
The company says its approach could reduce the battery industry’s reliance on mined metals — a reliance that’s only anticipated to grow in the coming decades. A study published last December found that demand for cobalt could increase by a factor of 17 and nickel by a factor of 28, depending on the size of EV uptake and advances in battery chemistries.
Thus far, the company’s been operating a demonstration-scale facility in Worcester, Massachusetts, and has expanded into a facility in Novi, Michigan, where it does analytical testing and material characterization. Between the two sites, the company can make around 15 tons of cathode materials a year. This latest funding round will help facilitate the development of a commercial-scale facility, which Battery Resourcers said in a statement will boost its capacity to process 10,000 tons of batteries per year, or batteries from around 20,000 EVs.
Another major piece of its proprietary recycling process is the ability to take in both old and new EV batteries, process them and formulate the newest kind of cathodes used in today’s batteries. “So they can take in 10-year-old batteries from a Chevy Volt and reformulate the metals to make the high-Ni cathode active materials in use today,” a company spokesman explained to TechCrunch.
Battery Resourcers is already receiving inquiries from automakers and consumer electronics companies, O’Kronley said, though he did not provide additional details. But InMotion Ventures, the venture capital arm of Jaguar Land Rover, said in a statement its participation in the round as a “significant investment.”
“[Battery Resourcers’] proprietary end-to-end recycling process supports Jaguar Land Rover’s journey to become a net zero carbon business by 2039,” InMotion managing director Sebastian Peck said.
Battery Resourcers was founded in 2015 after being spun out from Massachusetts’ Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The company has previously received support from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium, a collaboration between General Motors, Ford Motor Company and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.
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Mexican unicorn Kavak raises a $485M Series D at a $4B valuation
Kavak, the Mexican startup that’s disrupted the used car market in Mexico and Argentina, today announced its Series D of $485 million, which now values the company at $4 billion. This round more than triples their previous valuation of $1.15 billion, which established them as a unicorn just a couple of months ago in October of 2020. Kavak is now one of the top five highest-valued startups in Latin America.
The round was led by D1 Capital Partners, Founders Fund, Ribbit and BOND, and brings Kavak’s total capital raised to date to more than $900 million. Kavak recently soft-launched in Brazil, and this new round of funding will be used to build out the Brazilian market and beyond, said Carlos García Ottati, Kavak’s CEO and co-founder. The company plans to do a full launch in Brazil in the next 60 days, García said, and we can expect to see Kavak in markets outside Latin America in the next 24 months, he added.
“We were built to solve emerging market problems,” García said.
Kavak, which was founded in 2016, is an online marketplace that aims to bring transparency, security and access to financing to the used car market. The company also offers its own financing through its fintech arm, Kavak Capital, and counts more than 2,500 employees and 20 logistics and reconditioning hubs in Mexico and Argentina.
“In Latin America, 90% of the [used car] transactions are informal, which leads to a 40% fraud rate,” said García, who experienced these challenges firsthand when he moved to Mexico from Colombia a couple of years ago and bought a used car.
“My budget allowed me to buy a used car, but there was no infrastructure around it. It took me six months to buy the car, and then the car had legal and mechanical issues and I lost most of my money,” he said. Kavak buys cars from individuals, refurbishes them and offers warranties to buyers.
“Instead of buying a new car, they can buy a better car that still has all the warranties. It’s a really aspirational process,” said García. The company, which really amounts to four companies in one given its areas of focus, was built to be comprehensive by design in order to meet the various gaps in the market, García said.
“When you’re building a business here [Latin America], you need to build several businesses because so many things are broken,” he said. That’s why the financing option, for example, has been a key to their success, according to García.
Financing has traditionally been hard to come by in Brazil, and as García said, the used car market lacks infrastructure there, too. That being said, Brazil is Latin America’s fintech hub, and the space has made leaps and bounds over the last 7-10 years with companies such as Nubank, PagSeguro, Creditas, PicPay, and others leading the way. As a result, credit cards and loans are more widely available today in the region, offering competition for Kavak Capital. While Kavak has localized some of its product for the Brazilian market — namely building out a Portuguese language version of the app and website — García said the markets are very similar.
“In Brazil, you still have the same problems that you have in Mexico, but Brazil is a little more developed, especially in fintech, which is light years ahead of Mexico,” he said.
With the Brazilian product heading to the races, García said they already have plans for other regions, though he declined to name them.
“80% of people in emerging markets don’t have access to a car,” García said of the global market size. “We want to go into big markets where customers are facing similar problems and where Kavak can really change their lives,” he added.
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Highlights from Berkeley SkyDeck’s virtual demo day
With 17 startups participating, Berkeley SkyDeck’s Demo Day isn’t the largest cohort we’ve seen by any stretch. The collection of companies is, however, defined by a wide range of focuses, from pioneering diabetes treatments to retrofitting autonomous trucking, curated by the SkyDeck’s small team and a number of advisors.
Founded in 2012, the accelerator is focused on developing early-stage companies tied to the University of California system. Applicants must be affiliated with either one of the 10 UC schools or their national laboratories in Berkeley, Livermore and Los Alamos. Notable alumni include micromobility unicorn, Lime, and delivery robotics firm, Kiwi.
In 2020, SkyDeck — along with much of the rest of the world — went virtual.
“While flight restrictions did cause some international founders to pull crazy hours from our home countries to participate in the sessions, virtual sessions allowed additional members of our teams to participate that would otherwise not have been able to do so,” the accelerator’s organizers said in a TechCrunch post last year. “We are also hearing chatter that Demo Day will be larger than ever before because virtual events are much more scalable.”
The 17 startups presenting today were whittled down from 1,850 applicants, according to the accelerator. Being a member of the cohort involves six months of launch assistance from SkyDeck, coupled with up $105,000. “In six months, you’re going to pitch on stage at demo day, to an institutional investor in your industry,” Executive Director Caroline Winnett tells TechCrunch.
Here’s a closer look at six highlights from this Demo Day.
EndoCrine
Image Credits: EndoCrine Bio, Inc.
Building on technologies developed in the stem cell research labs of UCSF, EndoCrine is looking to commercialize a better way to discover and develop drugs. Specifically, the startup is hoping to improve diabetes treatment beyond standard insulin injections.
“EndoCrine’s proprietary human stem cell-derived islet platform revolutionizes the drug discovery and development process, saving years of time and millions of dollars usually spent by pharma companies,” CEO Gopika Nair said in a statement offered to TechCrunch. “Our innovative solution opens an exciting era of personalized medicine in diabetes.”
The company says SkyDeck helped it take the earliest steps out of the lab and into startup mode.
NuPort Robotics
Image Credits: NuPort Robotics Inc.
NuPort Robotics is among the most mature of the 17 startups included here. In fact, in mid-March, the startup signed a partnership with Canadian Tire and the Ontario government, as part of a $3 million investment in an autonomous middle-mile trucking solution.
Rather than building autonomous trucking from scratch, NuPort’s solution is designed to retrofit semis with autonomous technologies.
“This results in operational cost reduction by eliminating the need to replace their existing fleet and yields a safer, more efficient and sustainable transportation system,” CEO Raghavender Sahdev tells TechCrunch.
The Hurd Co.
Image Credits: The Hurd Co.
The Hurd Co.’s goal is simple: reduce the environmental impact of clothing companies by helping to remove trees from the process. Specifically, the company creates cellulosic fiber pulp from agricultural byproducts. This is designed to bypass tree-based agrilose, which is used in the production of a wide variety of fabrics, including rayon.
“Apparel brands are scrambling for new, low-impact fabric that will allow them to meet their ambitious sustainability goals,” CEO Taylor Heisley-Cook tells TechCrunch. “We completely eliminate trees from the supply chain with a hyper-efficient process that dramatically reduces brands’ impact on the environment.”
The company says its process uses half the water and significantly less energy than standard processes. The technology was developed by Hurd’s CTO, Charles Cai.
Humm
Image Credits: Humm
I won’t lie, this is the one in the batch I have the most questions about, having seen a number of companies claim their wearables can increase memory.
Here’s what CEO Iain McIntyre has to say: “It’s ideal for activities that depend on memory, like reading, problem solving or multi-tasking. The Humm patch uses tACS (transcranial alternating stimulation) and in clinical research studies, the Humm patch saw a measurable (+~20%) improvement against placebo.”
It’s an interesting underlying technology, and the advisors — which include a number of university professors in the sciences — certainly see commercial potential. There are some lingering questions around tACS.
Quoting Scientific American from January: “The potential therapeutic effects of tACS on memory, food craving and other neural processes have been tested in dozens of studies in the past. Questions have been raised about whether this method actually exerts any meaningful changes in the brain, however.”
Definitely interested in seeing more about this one and perhaps taking it for a spin when the product ships, later this year.
As far as elevator pitches go, Publica may have the best one of the show. “Publica is Shopify for Digital Content.” Essentially, the company wants to be a direct conduit between content creators and consumers.
“Publica is a service that enables authors and content creators to have their own custom storefront to share, market and sell e-books, audiobooks and any other types of digital content with no intermediaries,” CEO Pablo Laurino tells TechCrunch. “In the era of D2C and marketplaces, Publica helps authors and content to achieve that on their own storefront, offering authors complete control over their brand and ownership of the relationships.”
The system helps creators make their own own digital storefront to sell a wide variety of products, including audiobooks and e-books. The site is already up and running, with more than 1,200 stores created by 250 clients.
Serinus Labs
Image Credits: Serinus Labs
Serinus is developing a warning system for detecting failure in lithium-ion batteries.
Per CEO, Hossain Fahad, “Battery safety is the biggest challenge in the EV industry today. Serinus Labs’ proprietary LiCANS technology provides early warning signals to prevent catastrophic battery failure in electric vehicles.”
The tech uses gas sensing to detect early traces of vented gases that occur prior to battery failure.
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Aurora and Volvo partner to bring autonomous long-haul trucks to North America
The autonomous vehicle startup Aurora Innovation said Tuesday it has reached an agreement with Volvo to jointly develop autonomous semi trucks for North America.
The partnership, which the two companies say will span several years and is through Volvo’s Autonomous Solutions unit, will focus on trucks built to operate autonomously on highways between hubs for Volvo customers. The Aurora Driver technology stack — Aurora’s self-driving software, computer and sensor suite — will be integrated into Volvo trucks.
The announcement comes fresh on the heels of the startup’s recent acquisition of Uber’s self-driving subsidiary and a separate deal with Toyota to develop self-driving minivans. Aurora now has partnerships with two of the three largest trucking manufacturers — Paccar and Volvo — that produce and sell nearly 50% of all Class 8 trucks in the country.
“Our previously announced collaborations with partners such as Paccar will continue in parallel to the collaboration with Volvo,” an Aurora spokesperson told TechCrunch. “As Paccar’s first self-driving technology partner, the unique nature of our partnership enables us to build Paccar’s first redundant truck that will be able to operate without a safety driver, bring it to market first and deploy it broadly.”
Aurora said its Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave lidar — through its acquisitions of companies Blackmore and OURS Technology — will be key to solving autonomous long-range trucking. Lidar, or light detection and ranging radar, is considered to be a necessary component of self-driving systems. Aurora’s pitch is that unlike traditional time-of-flight lidar, its technology provides the long-range visibility needed to be able to spot hazards with enough time to stop or slow down.
The announcement also marks a major acceleration for Volvo’s autonomous vehicle arm, Volvo Autonomous Solutions. It’s the business unit’s first deal to bring autonomous trucking to the road.
Since its founding in 2017, Aurora has rapidly become one of the leaders in self-driving tech, attracting backing from Amazon, Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners. The company was founded by former executives of Uber, Tesla and Google.
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Google alum startup Cartken and REEF Technology launch Miami’s first delivery robots
Self-driving and robotics startup Cartken has partnered with REEF Technology, a startup that operates parking lots and neighborhood hubs, to bring self-driving delivery robots to the streets of downtown Miami.
With this announcement, Cartken officially comes out of stealth mode. The company, founded by ex-Google engineers and colleagues behind the unrequited Bookbot, was formed to develop market-ready tech in self-driving, AI-powered robotics and delivery operations in 2019, but the team has kept operations under wraps until now. This is Cartken’s first large deployment of self-driving robots on sidewalks.
After a few test months, the REEF-branded electric-powered robots are now delivering dinner orders from REEF’s network of delivery-only kitchens to people located within a 3/4-mile radius in downtown Miami. The robots, which are insulated and thus can preserve the heat of a plate of spaghetti or other hot food, are pre-stationed at designated logistics hubs and dispatched with orders for delivery as the food is prepared.
“We want to show how future-forward Miami can be,” Matt Lindenberger, REEF’s chief technology officer, told TechCrunch. “This is a great chance to show off the capabilities of the tech. The combination of us having a big presence in Miami, the fact that there are a lot of challenges around congestion as COVID subsides, still shows a really good environment where we can show how this tech can work.”
Lindenberg said Miami is a great place to start, but it’s just the beginning, with potential for the Cartken robots to be used for REEF’s other last-mile delivery businesses. Currently, only two restaurant delivery robots are operating in Miami, but Lindenberger said the company is planning to expand further into the city and outward into Fort Lauderdale, as well as other large metros the company operates in, such as Dallas, Atlanta, Los Angeles and eventually New York.
Lindenberger is hoping the presence of robots in the streets can act as a “force multiplier,” allowing them to scale while maintaining quality of service in a cost-effective way.
“We’re seeing an explosion in deliveries right now in a post-pandemic world and we foresee that to continue, so these types of no-contact, zero-emission automation techniques are really critical,” he said.
Cartken’s robots are powered by a combination of machine learning and rules-based programming to react to every situation that could occur, even if that just means safely stopping and asking for help, Christian Bersch, CEO of Cartken, told TechCrunch. REEF would have supervisors on site to remotely control the robot if needed, a caveat that was included in the 2017 legislation that allowed for the operation of self-driving delivery robots in Florida.
“The technology at the end of the day is very similar to that of a self-driving car,” said Bersch. “The robot is seeing the environment, planning around obstacles like pedestrians or lampposts. If there’s an unknown situation, someone can help the robot out safely because it can stop on a dime. But it’s important to also have that level of autonomy on the robot because it can react in a split second, faster than anybody remotely could, if something happens like someone jumps in front of it.”
REEF marks specific operating areas on the map for the robots and Cartken tweaks the configuration for the city, accounting for specific situations a robot might need to deal with, so that when the robots are given a delivery address, they can make moves and operate like any other delivery driver. Only this driver has an LTE connection and is constantly updating its location so REEF can integrate it into its fleet management capabilities.
Image Credits: REEF/Cartken
Eventually, Lindenberger said, they’re hoping to be able to offer the option for customers to choose robot delivery on the major food delivery platforms REEF works with like Postmates, UberEats, DoorDash or GrubHub. Customers would receive a text when the robot arrives so they could go outside and meet it. However, the tech is not quite there yet.
Currently the robots only make it street-level, and then the food is passed off to a human who delivers it directly to the door, which is a service that most customers prefer. Navigating into an apartment complex and to a customer’s unit is difficult for a robot to manage just yet, and many customers aren’t quite ready to interact directly with a robot.
“It’s an interim step, but this was a path for us to move forward quickly with the technology without having any other boundaries,” said Lindenberger. “Like with any new tech, you want to take it in steps. So a super important step which we’ve now taken and works very well is the ability to dispatch robots within a certain radius and know that they’re going to arrive there. That in and of itself is a huge step and it allows us to learn what kind of challenges you have in terms of that very last step. Then we can begin to work with Cartken to solve that last piece. It’s a big step just being able to do this automation.”
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Recycling startup Redwood Materials is partnering with Proterra to supply EV battery materials sustainably
A growing number of companies have emerged over the last few years determined to reduce waste in the electric vehicle battery market. Chief among these is recycling firm Redwood Materials, which has quickly expanded since its launch in 2017 by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel to become the largest lithium-ion battery recycler in North America. Now the firm is teaming up with electric commercial vehicle manufacturer Proterra in a deal that may help boost the domestic battery supply chain.
This is the first publicly announced partnership between Redwood and an automaker.
Under the agreement, all Proterra batteries will be sent to Redwood’s facilities for recycling in Carson City, Nevada. The two companies entered the agreement in January, but have been in discussion since last summer, when Proterra reached out to learn more about Redwood’s recycling process. That led to a trip out to Redwood’s facilities in Nevada to see if the recycler could process Proterra battery packs.
“That went really well,” Proterra CTO Dustin Grace told TechCrunch. Grace worked for Straubel for around nine years at Tesla. “We were super excited to see their operation. From there, we started work on our master supply agreement.”
Proterra has sent around 26,000 pounds of battery material to Nevada for recycling since entering the partnership, though this does not represent the pace of future deliveries. Overall, Redwood receives 60 tons per day, or 20,000 tons of batteries per year.
The batteries that power Proterra’s fleets are designed to last the lifespan of the vehicle, but the company offers a battery leasing program that guarantees replacement after six years — which means plenty of useful life will remain in the battery, as much as 80-90% charging capacity. To exploit the remainder of this capacity, Proterra has plans to reuse the batteries in second-life applications — such as in stationary storage systems hooked up to Proterra charging hardware — before they head to Nevada.
“First the grading of the battery will occur at Proterra by our remanufacturing engineering team. If the battery is deemed ready for second-life, it will go into one of those applications; if it’s not, it gets recycled,” Grace said.
Only once all this useful life is exhausted will the batteries be sent to Redwood, where the waste will be reprocessed into valuable raw material. And with the transit EV market poised to reach 50% of all annual sales by 2025, there will be plenty of batteries that will need reprocessing.
The news comes just weeks after Redwood announced it was teaming up with e-bike manufacturer Specialized to recycle its batteries. Redwood already has arrangements to process scrap from Panasonic’s battery cell production at the Nevada Tesla Gigafactory, and with Amazon to recycle EV batteries and other waste. Through these business-to-business partnerships Redwood aims to develop a circular battery supply chain, supplying the raw materials back to the manufacturer. The company also accepts electronics and batteries from everyday consumers, which can be mailed to Redwood via a mailing address posted on its website.
The partnership is a sign that both companies are thinking large-scale and long-term. A spokesperson for Redwood said in a statement to TechCrunch that the recycler is focused on “developing the solution for a fully closed-loop recycling for EV batteries.” That means finding truly sustainable, long-term sources of materials like cobalt, lithium and copper to eventually move beyond terrestrial mining. And Straubel has been vocal in the past about his ambition to grow Redwood into one of the world’s largest battery materials companies.
As more battery-grade raw materials become available in the United States, Proterra sees an opportunity to eventually expand into domestic battery-cell manufacturing.
“It’s still early days but we’re trying to set ourselves up for the future state of this market at scale. That’s really the primary benefit of this partnership existing today,” Grace said. “The way we see it, domestic cell production for Proterra is a very, very important part of our roadmap here in the coming years. The idea of generating more battery-grade raw materials on North American soil directly supports the expansion of that battery manufacturing concept within the U.S. So I think this starting now absolutely aids our plans for domestic cell manufacturing in the near future.”
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ChargerHelp raises $2.75M to keep EV chargers working
The coming wave of electric vehicles will require more than thousands of charging stations. In addition to being installed, they also need to work — and today, that isn’t happening.
If a station doesn’t send out an error or a driver doesn’t report it, network providers might never know there’s even a problem. Kameale C. Terry, who co-founded ChargerHelp!, an on-demand repair app for electric vehicle charging stations, has seen these issues firsthand.
One customer assumed that poor usage rates at a particular station was due to a lack of EVs in the area, Terry recalled in a recent interview. That wasn’t the problem.
“There was an abandoned vehicle parked there and the station was surrounded by mud,” said Terry who is CEO and co-founded the company with Evette Ellis.
Demand for ChargerHelp’s service has attracted customers and investors. The company said it has raised $2.75 million from investors Trucks VC, Kapor Capital, JFF, Energy Impact Partners and The Fund. This round values the startup, which was founded in January 2020, at $11 million post-money.
The funds will be used to build out its platform, hire beyond its 27-person workforce and expand its service area. ChargerHelp works directly with the charging manufacturers and network providers.
“Today when a station goes down there’s really no troubleshooting guidance,” said Terry, noting that it takes getting someone out into the field to run diagnostics on the station to understand the specific problem. After an onsite visit, a technician then typically shares data with the customer, and then steps are taken to order the correct and specific part — a practice that often doesn’t happen today.
While ChargerHelp is couched as an on-demand repair app, it is also acts as a preventative maintenance service for its customers.
Powering up
The idea for ChargerHelp came from Terry’s experience working at EV Connect, where she held a number of roles, including head of customer experience and director of programs. During her time there, she worked with 12 manufacturers, which gave her knowledge into inner workings and common problems with the chargers.
It was here that she spotted a gap in the EV charging market.
“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.
And yet, the general practice was to use electrical contractors to fix issues at the charging stations. Terry said it could take as long as 30 days to get an electrical contractor on site to repair these non-electrical problems.
Terry often took matters in her own hands if issues arose with stations located in Los Angeles, where she is based.
“If there was a part that needed to be swapped out, I would just go do it myself,” Terry said, adding she didn’t have a background in software or repairs. “I thought, if I can figure this stuff out, then anyone can.”
In January 2020, Terry quit her job and started ChargerHelp. The newly minted founder joined the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, where she developed a curriculum to teach people how to repair EV chargers. It was here that she met Ellis, a career coach at LACI who also worked at the Long Beach Job Corp Center. Ellis is now the chief workforce officer at ChargerHelp.
Since then, Terry and Ellis were accepted into Elemental Excelerator’s startup incubator, raised about $400,000 in grant money, launched a pilot program with Tellus Power focused on preventative maintenance and landed contracts with EV charging networks and manufacturers such as EV Connect, ABB and SparkCharge. Terry said they have also hired their core team of seven employees and trained their first tranche of technicians.
Hiring approach
Image Credits: ChargerHelp
ChargerHelp takes a workforce-development approach to finding employees. The company only hires in cohorts, or groups, of employees.
The company received more than 1,600 applications in its first recruitment round for electric vehicle service technicians, according to Terry. Of those, 20 were picked to go through training and 18 were ultimately hired to service contracts across six states, including California, Oregon, Washington, New York and Texas. Everyone picked to go through training is paid a stipend and earn two safety licenses.
The startup will begin its second recruitment round in April. All workers are full-time with a guaranteed wage of $30 an hour and are being given shares in the startup, Terry said. The company is working directly with workforce development centers in the areas where ChargerHelp needs technicians.
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Baton raises $10.5M to create ‘drop zones,’ where truckers can hand off freight
In the trucking industry, “dwell and detention” times are the enemies of efficiency, profits and drivers. More than two billion hours are lost each year due to dwell — the time spent at a distribution yard or facility — and detention — the gap between when unloading or loading is supposed to begin and when it actually does.
Baton, a San Francisco-based startup developed out of 8VC’s incubator program, has developed a business that it believes will solve these long-standing problems for truckers. The company’s name gives a hint at its business model. Baton is developing a network of drop zones, 24-hour facilities it has sub-leased from partners, that are located outside of busy urban centers. Long-haul truckers can pull up and leave their loaded trailers at these drop zones. Baton then partners with local fleets of Class 8 trucks that will arrive at the drop site, grab the load and take the freight to its final destination.
The startup developed a software platform that coordinates vehicles, drop-zones, warehouses and local drivers through a single API. Customers also receive live automated updates via API as loads are delivered.
“In long-haul trucking, there’s a remarkable amount of wasted time,” co-founder Andrew Berberick said in a recent interview. Baton’s pitch is that it eliminates hours wasted with dwell and detention as well as the time spent sitting in traffic. The company says it can also help increase wages for drivers, who are typically paid by the mile and not the hour, as well as cut carbon emissions.
Baton has landed long-haul trucking firms as customers, including CRST, the private freight company that carries loads for some of the country’s largest retailers, including Walmart. And it’s also attracted a variety of strategic investors. The company raised its first $3.3 million from real estate corporation Prologis and 8VC, in a seed round that closed in December 2019. Now, it’s tacking on more capital and investors in a Series A funding round, co-led by 8VC and Maersk Growth, the corporate venture arm of logistics giant AP Moller-Maersk.
Baton raised $10.5 million in the Series A, and now has a post-money valuation of $50 million, co-founders Nate Robert and Berberick told TechCrunch. Prologis, Ryder, Lineage Logistics, Project44 CEO Jett McCandless, KeepTruckin’ CEO Shoaib Makani, Clarendon Capital operating partner John Larkin, I.S.G founder Trace Haggard and Cooley LLC all participated in the round.
Baton has several drop zones in Los Angeles, with plans to open more in the city. Robert and Berberick said their plan is to open zones in Atlanta, Chicago and Dallas in the next 12 to 18 months.
Baton’s short-term aim is to end waste in human-driven trucking operations. But Robert says the business model is well-positioned to handle what he says will be the first viable applications of autonomous trucks. “The answer is on highways only,” Robert said. “And for that to occur you’ll have to have a nationwide network of transfer hubs.”
Baton is already piloting the idea, which Robert called “autonomous relays,” with an unnamed self-driving trucks company on the Arizona-California border.
“As we see automated and eventually electric trucks become standard for certain routes, the network of Baton hubs and the coordination provided by its software will become seen as core infrastructure. Baton makes the transformation to automated trucking possible,” 8VC partner and co-founder Jake Medwell said.
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Investors feed the meter for curb management startup Automotus
The curbside is being squeezed as the number of commercial vehicle operators and gig economy workers battle over this increasingly scarce real estate — a problem that has been compounded by an uptick in on-demand delivery services fueled by the pandemic.
A number of startups such as Coord and curbflow have popped up in recent years, all aiming to solve this supply and demand problem. One entrant, the three-year-old startup Automotus, is beginning to rack up deployments in zones within cities like Santa Monica, Pittsburgh, Bellevue, Washington and Turin, Italy. A project in Los Angeles is also in the works.
Investors have taken notice as well. The company, which developed video analytics technology to monitor and manage curbsides for cities, said in February it had raised $1.2 million in a seed round led by Quake Capital, Techstars Ventures, Kevin Uhlenhaker (the co-founder & CEO at NuPark, which was acquired by Passport) and Baron Davis. CEO Jordan Justus told TechCrunch the company’s total raise is now $2.3 million. New investors include Ben Bear, Derrick Ko, and Zaizhuang Cheng of micromobility company Spin.
The startup is still small, with just 11 full-time employees. However, Justus said the newly raised funds are being used to expand into new markets and to hire more employees.
Automotus uses computer vision technology to capture video of parking zones — places that might be designated for only zero-emissions vehicles or commercial deliveries. Their software handles a variety of functions, including analysis and enforcement. Cities are able to access analytics through a web app. Commercial fleets are able to access information about parking zones via open APIs and in some cases a mobile app, according to Justus.
Image Credits: Automotus
For instance, one newly announced pilot project with Santa Monica and Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator will monitor a one-square-mile zero-emissions delivery zone in the city. Automotus will provide anonymized data for evaluating the zone’s impacts on delivery efficiency, safety, congestion and emissions, and will make real-time parking availability data available to all zero-emissions delivery zone drivers.
The startup, which was founded in late 2017 and is a Techstars alum, makes its money primarily through revenue sharing on its enforcement feature. Automotus gets a slice of the payment commercial customers are automatically charged when parking in specific zones, as well as transaction fees on parking violations. While the analytics might help cities set policy or designate pick-up and drop-off zones, it’s the enforcement feature that Justus says offers the biggest opportunity.
Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles used Automotus’ tech to fully automate parking enforcement. Automotus said enforcement efficiency and revenue increased by more than 500%, and added that implementing these measures led to a 24% increase in parking turnover and a 20% reduction in traffic.
“The enforcement component is really critical to the fleet operators because they need to know that these zones are managed efficiently and managed well so that they’re available for commercial use, if that’s what they’re intended for,” he said.
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Berlin’s Blacklane raises $26M to expand its high-end chauffeur-driven sustainable car service
As the Ubers of the world continue to scale, a smaller on-demand transportation startup has raised some funding in Germany, underscoring the opportunities that remain for startups in the space targeting specific service niches. Blacklane — the Berlin startup that provides on-demand black-car chauffeur services in Berlin, London, Dubai, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Singapore and 16 other cities — has closed a round of €22 million ($26 million at current rates). After taking a majority stake in Havn, the Jaguar-hatched electric car service in London, in February, Blacklane said that it will be using this latest round of funding to continue expanding sustainable travel initiatives, and to continue expanding its existing business with more flexible options for riding.
The funding, which is being made at an up round valuation, is a sign of how the company is showing signs of growth after a year in which monthly revenues dropped 99% in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting drop in travel, and specifically people willing to be in small spaces that are shared with others.
“The global travel and mobility industries have suffered, with several players struggling between drastic cuts, hibernation or ceasing operations. Blacklane has taken the opportunity to cater to travelers’ emerging needs,” said Dr. Jens Wohltorf, CEO and co-founder of Blacklane, in a statement. “Thanks to this financing, we will continue to fast-track our innovation, with zero layoffs.”
The company said that the investment is coming from existing investors German automotive giant Daimler, the UAE’s ALFAHIM Group and btov Partners. And while it is coming at an up round, Blacklane is not disclosing any figures, nor has it ever disclosed valuation. Previous backers of the company also include the strategic investment arm of Recruit Holdings, the Japanese HR giant, and it has raised around $100 million to date, including a round of about $45 million in 2018.
The funding is coming after what has been an extremely rough year for travel and transportation startups due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with Blacklane itself seeing monthly revenues drop 99% after the pandemic hit last year, the company tells me.
Some others in the space that diversified into other areas like food delivery or other kinds of transport (e.g. bikes or scooters) were able to offset declines in their more core ride-hailing services, which in the meantime were repositioned as a safer alternative to public transportation. Blacklane, however, had never positioned itself as a ride for “everyman” — its core use case were higher-end rides and airport trips (which had also died a death) — so when movement shut down, Blacklane’s business nosedived.
It was particularly bad timing for Blacklane, considering that in the lead up to the pandemic, it looked to be on course to turn a profit on its focused model. (While financials for 2020 will take a while to be posted, the most recent results for the company showed a net loss of about $18 million in 2018.)
The reason that Blacklane has managed to raise at an up round tells another side of the story, however.
As companies in transport and travel gingerly started to show the smaller signs of recovery last summer, so too did Blacklane. It coupled that with the first steps of diversification itself.
Earlier this month, it added “chauffeur hailing” in 22 cities, an on-demand service that reduced the lead time for an order to under 30 minutes (its previous service was based on more advanced bookings). It also changed its pricing structure to get more competitive on shorter distances, since so many of the airport rides that were the basis of its revenues have yet to return.
In addition to that, Blacklane took a majority stake in Havn, an electric-based car service hatched by Jaguar, for an undisclosed sum, to spearhead a move into more sustainable travel options alongside the fleet of Teslas already operated by Blacklane.
“Worldwide travel restrictions give us a one-time chance to reset our expectations for safe and sustainable trips,” said Wohltorf in a statement. “Blacklane will recover responsibly and continue to grow while caring for both people and the planet.”
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