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John Deere buys autonomous tractor startup Bear Flag Robotics
In the world of robotic startups, acquisition is often as good an outcome as any. And when it comes to robotic tractor startups, you could do worse than being acquired by John Deere. The agricultural technology giant announced today that it’s set to acquire Bear Flag Robotics for $250 million.
The Bay Area-based firm, which specializes in autonomous farming heavy machinery, was founded in 2017. They first crossed our radar the following year, as a member of YC’s Winter 2018 cohort.
“We got a tour of an orchard and just how pronounced the labor problem is,” co-founder Aubrey Donnellan told TechCrunch at the time. “They’re struggling to fill seats on tractors. We talked to other growers in California. We kept hearing the same thing over and over: Labor is one of the most significant pain points. It’s really hard to find quality labor. The workforce is aging out. They’re leaving the country and going into other industries.”
In the intervening years, John Deere tapped Bear Flag for its own Startup Collaborator initiative. And the robotics firm has also begun to deploy its technology to an undisclosed (“limited,” per their wording) number of sites in the U.S.
“One of the biggest challenges farmers face today is the availability of skilled labor to execute time-sensitive operations that impact farming outcomes. Autonomy offers a safe and productive alternative to address that challenge head on,” co-founder and CEO Igino Cafiero, says in a release. “Bear Flag’s mission to increase global food production and reduce the cost of growing food through machine automation is aligned with Deere’s and we’re excited to join the Deere team to bring autonomy to more farms.”
Agricultural is one of several robotics categories that have seen a spike in interest in the past year, due to labor shortages that predate but were exacerbated by the global pandemic. Of course, that interest doesn’t make anyone immune from the difficulties of launching a robotics startup.
Last month, apple-picking robotics firm Abundant confirmed it was closing up shop, noting, “After a series of promising commercial trials with prototype apple harvesters, the company was unable to raise enough investment funding to continue development and launch a production system,” the company noted at the time.
An acquisition seems like a reasonable outcome for a company like Bear Flag. The startup gains a lot of resources from its massive new owner, and its new owner adds some new tech to its portfolio. Indeed, John Deere has been pretty aggressively looking to expand into more cutting-edge technologies like robotics and drones in recent years.
Bear Flag will retain operations in the Bay Area.
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Marvell nabs Innovium for $1.1B as it delves deeper into cloud ethernet switches
Marvell announced this morning it has reached an agreement to acquire Innovium for $1.1 billion in an all-stock deal. The startup, which raised over $400 million according to Crunchbase data, makes networking ethernet switches optimized for the cloud.
Marvell president and CEO Matt Murphy sees Innovium as a complementary piece to the $10 billion Inphi acquisition last year, giving the company, which makes copper-based chips, more ways to work across modern cloud data centers.
“Innovium has established itself as a strong cloud data center merchant switch silicon provider with a proven platform, and we look forward to working with their talented team who have a strong track record in the industry for delivering multiple generations of highly successful products,” Marvell CEO Matt Murphy said in a statement.
Innovium founder and CEO Rajiv Khemani, who will remain as an advisor post-close, told a familiar tale from a startup CEO being acquired, seeing the sale as a way to accelerate more quickly as part of a larger organization than it could on its own. “As we engaged with Marvell, it became clear that our data center optimized portfolio combined with Marvell’s scale, leading technology platform and complementary portfolio, can accelerate our growth and vision of delivering breakthrough switch silicon for the cloud and edge,” he wrote in a company blog post announcing the deal.
The company, which was founded in 2014, raised more than $143 million last year on a post-money valuation of $1.3 billion, according to PitchBook data. The question is, was this a reasonable deal for the company given that valuation?
No company wants to sell for less than it was last valued by its investors. In some cases, such deals can still be accretive for early backers of the selling concern, but not always. In this case TechCrunch is not privy to all the details of the Innovium cap table and what its later investors may have built into their deals with the company in the form of downside protection; such measures can tilt the value of the sale of a company more toward its later and final investors. This is usually managed at the expense of its earlier backers and employees.
Still, the Innovium deal should not be seen as a failure. Building a company that sells for north of $1 billion in equity value is impressive. The deal appears to be slightly smaller in enterprise value terms. In the business world, enterprise value is a useful method of valuing the true cost of an acquisition. In the case of Innovium, a large cash position, what was described as “Innovium cash and exercise proceeds expected at closing of approximately $145 million,” lowered the cost of the transaction to a more modest $955 million in net outlays.
Our general perspective is that the sale is probably not the outcome that Innovium’s backers had hoped for, but that it may still prove lucrative to early workers and early investors, and still works at that lower figure. It’s also notable how in today’s market of mega-rounds and surfeit unicorns, an exit north of the $1 billion mark in equity terms can be viewed as a disappointment in any terms. Innovium is selling for around the price that Facebook paid for Instagram in 2012, a deal that at the time was so large that it dominated technology headlines around the world.
But with so much capital available today, private valuations are soaring and mega deals abound. And recent rounds north of $100 million, much like Innovium’s 2020-era, $143 million round, can set companies up with rich valuations and a narrow path in front of them to beat those heightened expectations.
What likely happened? Perhaps Innovium found itself with more cash than opportunities to spend it; perhaps it simply needed a large partner to help it better sell into its market. With expected revenues of $150 million in Marvell’s fiscal 2023, its next fiscal period, Innovium did not fail to reach scale. It may have simply grown well as a private, independent company, and stalled out after its last round.
Regardless, a billion-dollar exit is a billion-dollar exit. The deal is expected to close by the end of this year. While both company boards have approved the deal, it still must clear regular closing hurdles, including approval by Innovium’s private stock holders.
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Google is building its own chip for the Pixel 6
Google just dumped a whole bunch of news about its upcoming Pixel 6 smartphone. Maybe the company was looking to get out in front of August 11’s big Samsung event — or perhaps it’s just hoping to keep people interested in the months leading up to a big fall announcement (and beat additional leaks to the punch).
In either case, we got the first look at the upcoming Android smartphone, including a fairly massive redesign of the camera system on the rear. The company has traded its square configuration for a big, black bar that appears to indicate an even larger push into upgraded hardware after a couple of generations spent insisting that software/AI are the grounds on which it has chosen to fight.
More interesting, however, is the arrival of Tensor, a new custom SoC (system on a chip) that will debut on the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro. It’s an important step from the company, as it looks to differentiate itself in a crowded smartphone field — something the company has admittedly struggled with in the past.
That means moving away from Qualcomm chips on these higher-end systems, following in Apple’s path of creating custom silicon. That said, the chips will be based on the same ARM architecture that Qualcomm uses to create its otherwise ubiquitous Snapdragon chips, and Google will still rely on the San Diego company to supply components for its budget-minded A Series.
Image Credits: Google
The Tensor name is a clear homage to Google’s TensorFlow ML, which has driven a number of its projects. And unsurprisingly, the company sites AI/ML as foundational to the chip’s place in the forthcoming phones. The Pixel team has long pushed software-based solutions, such as computational photography, as a differentiator.
“The team that designed our silicon wanted to make Pixel even more capable. For example, with Tensor we thought about every piece of the chip and customized it to run Google’s computational photography models,” Google writes. “For users, this means entirely new features, plus improvements to existing ones.”
Beyond the upgraded camera system, Tensor will be central to improving things such as speech recognition and language learning. Details are understandably still thin (the full reveal is happening in the fall, mind), but today’s announcement seems geared toward laying out what the future looks like for a revamped Pixel team — and certainly these sorts of focuses play into precisely what Google ought to be doing in the smartphone space: focusing on its smarts in AI and software.
In May of last year, key members of the Pixel team left Google, pointing to what looked to be a transition for the team. Hardware head Rick Osterloh was reported to have had harsh words at the time.
“AI is the future of our innovation work, but the problem is we’ve run into computing limitations that prevented us from fully pursuing our mission,” Osterloh wrote in today’s post. “So we set about building a technology platform built for mobile that enabled us to bring our most innovative AI and machine learning (ML) to our Pixel users.”
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No new Galaxy Note this year as Samsung’s foldables gain S Pen functionality
Samsung sent out invites for its August 11 Unpacked event last week. While it’s clear this is going to be packed (somewhat ironically) even by the company’s standards, the event may well be as notable for what it doesn’t include. Namely, a slew of rumors have pointed to Samsung skipping its annual Galaxy Note update.
In a blog post today, the company’s president and head of Mobile Communications Business, TM Roh, writes, “Instead of unveiling a new Galaxy Note this time around, we will further broaden beloved Note features to more Samsung Galaxy devices.” The language isn’t entirely clear what that means for the future of Samsung’s beloved – if occasional erratic – phablet. No Note this event? This year? This … ever?
Samsung offered TechCrunch the following clarification, “We will not be launching new Galaxy Note devices in 2021. Instead, Samsung plans to continue to expand the Note experience and bring many of its popular productivity and creativity features, including the S Pen, across our Galaxy ecosystem. We will share more details on our future portfolio once we are ready to announce.”
Early rumors chalked the lack of a new Note up to supply chain problems that have persisted throughout much of 2020 and 2021. But further speculation has left many wondering whether the company may finally be sunsetting the Galaxy Note series on the eve of its 10th anniversary. Is it possible that the pioneering phablet has run its course, especially as other Samsung flagships get larger and siphon off its biggest features?
What’s clear is that some of the devices announced on the 11th will follow in the footsteps of the Galaxy S21 and bring Note-like features including S-Pen functionality. Likely this means at least the Galaxy Z Fold, confirming earlier rumors that the foldable would be the latest Galaxy device to blur the line between it and the Note. Presumably this also means a further reinforced display for the product. Recent leaks point to a carrying case with a pen holster, rather than baking the slot directly into the Fold’s already complicated design.
“I hope you’ll join us as we debut our next Galaxy Z family and share some foldable surprises — including the first-ever S Pen designed specifically for foldable phones,” Roh writes. The executive also promises “even more refined style, armed with more durable, stronger material” on the new Galaxy Z Flip, while also confirming the arrival of a new Z Fold.
Rounding out the news is a reference to the One UI Watch that appears to confirm that the latest Galaxy Watch will also make a cameo at the upcoming Unpacked.
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Preorders for Panic’s Playdate handheld open July 29
Playdate, the adorable whimsy-and-nostalgia-box/handheld game system built by Panic (with some help from Teenage Engineering), has taken one more big step toward reality: it has an official preorder date. And it’s soon!
The company announced this morning that preorders for the handheld will go live on July 29th at 10 a.m. Pacific.
Looking to get one from the first batch? Here’s the other stuff you need to know:
- The handheld will cost $179, and they’ll be selling an optional case accessory for $29. They’re offering both as a bundle for $199, saving you a couple bucks if you already know you want both. No word yet on when the previously announced docking station will go on sale.
- It sounds like the actual ship date still isn’t fully locked in, but Panic says the first batch (20,000 units or so) should start going out “towards the end of the year,” with additional units going out in 2022. The company stresses that they’re not capping preorders so they can’t really “sell out,” but ordering earlier means getting it sooner.
- Preorders will be capped at two per person.
Panic first announced the Playdate in 2019. Games on the Playdate are released in “seasons”; in season one, two new titles will be released each week for 12 weeks. As experimental as it is charming, Panic is pretty open about what to expect of the titles. From their product page: “Some are short. Some are long. Will you love them all? Probably not. Will you have a great time trying them? Absolutely.”
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Samsung will announce new foldables on August 11
Samsung just sent out invites for its next Unpacked event. There are those companies that like to sneak hints into their invites — and then there’s Samsung. The note leads with the big, bold words “Get ready to unfold” and features a pair of flat-colored objects that can reasonably be said to resemble the form factors of the Galaxy Z Fold and Flip, respectively.
In keeping with…the general state of the world over the past year-and-a-half, the event will be held virtually on Wednesday, August 11. Interestingly, the company is also opening up preorders on its “next flagship,” sights and specs unseen. Perks for early preorders include “12 free months of Samsung Care+, up to an extra $200 trade-in credit and a special pre-order offer.”
But honestly, it’s generally best to wait until you actually see the thing and maybe even read a review or two.
There’s a lot to unpack (so to speak) ahead of the event. First, I’m probably not alone in expecting that the company would focus its next big event on the upcoming Galaxy Watch. The big event at MWC was a bit of a dud (not unlike MWC itself), offering up more information on the upcoming wearable partnership with Google, in lieu of announcing any hardware.
As the company noted at the time, “The upcoming One UI Watch will debut at an upcoming Unpacked event later this summer, sporting the new UI, as well as the forthcoming joint Samsung/Google platform.”
It seems reasonably likely that this will be the event where that will occur, even if the new watch doesn’t get top billing. For one thing we’re running out of summer. For another, rumors have the new Galaxy Watch set for a late-August (the 27th) release.
All told, this could well be a pretty huge summer event for the company, bucking last year’s trend of meting out devices one by one at virtual invents. Word on the street is we could be seeing a Galaxy Watch 4, Galaxy Z Fold 3, Galaxy Z Flip 3, Galaxy S21 FE (“Fan Edition” — basically the latest version of the company’s budget flagship) and even the Galaxy Buds Pro, which will more directly take on the AirPods Pro (which are getting a bit long in the tooth).
What’s missing in all of this? No points if you said the Note. Samsung’s well-loved phablet is reportedly not coming this year, as chip shortages continue to plague the industry. That would be a big hit to Samsung’s six-month cycle, though we’ll see how that all plays out soon enough.
The August 11th event kicks off at 10AM ET / 7AM PT.
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Intel rumored to be in talks to buy chip manufacturer GlobalFoundries for $30B
When it comes to M&A in the chip world, the numbers are never small. In 2020, four deals involving chip companies totaled $106 billion, led by Nvidia snagging ARM for $40 billion. One surprise from last year’s chip-laced M&A frenzy was Intel remaining on the sidelines. That would change if a rumored $30 billion deal to buy chip manufacturing concern GlobalFoundries comes to fruition.
The rumor was first reported by The Wall Street Journal yesterday.
Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insight & Strategies, who watches the chip industry closely, says that snagging GlobalFoundries would certainly make sense for Intel. The company is currently pursuing a new strategy to manufacture and sell chips for both Intel and to others under CEO Pat Gelsinger, who came on board in January to turn around the flagging chip maker.
“GlobalFoundries has technologies and processes that are specialized for 5G RF, IoT and automotive. Intel with GlobalFoundries would become what I call a ‘full-stack provider’ that could offer a customer everything. This is in full alignment with IDM 2.0 (Intel’s chip manufacturing strategy) and would get Intel there years before it could without GlobalFoundries,” Moorhead told TechCrunch.
It would also give Intel a chip manufacturing facility at a time when there are global chip shortages and huge demand for product from every corner, due in part to the pandemic and the impact it has had on the global supply chain. Intel has already indicated it has plans to spend more than $20 billion to build two fabs (chip manufacturing plants) in Arizona. Adding GlobalFoundries to these plans would give them a broad set of manufacturing capabilities in the coming years if it came to pass, but would also involve a significant investment of tens of billions of dollars to get there.
GlobalFoundries is a worldwide chip manufacturing concern based in the U.S. The company was spun off from Intel’s rival chip maker AMD in 2012, and is currently owned by Mubadala Investment Company, the investment arm of the government of Abu Dhabi.
Investors seem to like the idea of combining these two companies, with Intel stock up 1.59% as of publication. It’s important to note that this deal is still in the rumor stage and nothing is definitive or final yet. We will let you know if that changes.
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Xiaomi global shipments push past Apple for No. 2 spot
A banner quarter for Xiaomi helped the Chinese mobile company snag the No. 2 spot in global smartphone shipments, according to newly posted Q2 numbers from research firm Canalys. It’s pretty stunning growth for the company, up 83% year-over-year for the quarter and capturing 17% of the global market.
The surge puts Xiaomi at No. 2, globally, behind only Samsung’s 19% by a relatively small margin. Apple is at third with 14% (after its own solid growth has slowed), while fellow Chinese manufacturers Oppo and Vivo round out the top five at 10% a piece.
Huawei, of course, is nowhere to be seen among the top companies. It’s a pretty massive drop, due in no small part to blacklisting that has both barred the company from certain markets (namely, the U.S.) and cut off access to U.S. mobile products, including Google’s Android and various apps.
Image Credits: Canalys
Canalys cites aggressive pricing as a big factor in Xiaomi’s success — particularly contrasted with premium priced offerings from Samsung and Apple.
“It is now transforming its business model from challenger to incumbent, with initiatives such as channel partner consolidation and more careful management of older stock in the open market,” the analyst firm’s Research Manager Ben Stanton said in a release. “It is still largely skewed toward the mass market, however, and compared with Samsung and Apple, its average selling price is around 40% and 75% cheaper respectively. So a major priority for Xiaomi this year is to grow sales of its high-end devices, such as the Mi 11 Ultra.”
The company certainly isn’t a household name in the States (the company has dealt with its own issues here), but of late it has found particular success in Latin America, Africa and Western Europe. It seems that there are still plenty of markets available to continue its expansion as it looks to take on Samsung, even as Oppo and Vivo hope to continue their own respective rapid global growth.
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Valve launches Steam Deck, a $400 PC gaming portable
A new challenger has emerged in the gaming hardware category. Game distribution giant Valve today announced the launch of Steam Deck, a $399 gaming portable designed to take PC games on the go.
The handheld (which has echoes of several portable gaming rigs of years past) features a seven-inch screen and runs on a quad-core Zen 2 CPU, coupled with AMD RDNA 2 graphics and 16GB of RAM. Storage runs 64GB to 512GB, the latter of which bumps the price up to $649. The built-in storage can be augmented via microSD.
Image Credits: Valve
Naturally, the thing is custom built for Valve’s wildly popular Steam platform (it’s right there in the name, after all). Users log into their Steam account and their library — and friends list — are right there, ready to go. There’s even a dedicated Steam button.
The system has been rumored for some time now, but it enters the world during a rapidly evolving era for gaming. Essentially the company is hoping to outperform the admitted graphical limitations of Nintendo’s Switch (OLED or no), while filling in the gap as cloud-based gaming from companies like Microsoft are still working on a foothold as they deal with latency and other technical limitations. There’s also the Nvidia Shield Portable — though we’ve not heard much from that project, of late.
Image Credits: Valve
Flanking the 1280 x 800 touchscreen are a pair of trackpads and thumb sticks. A built-in gyroscope also uses movement to control the gaming experience. There’s a single USB-C port for charging, peripherals and connecting to a big screen, while a 40Wh battery promises between 7-8 hours of gameplay, by Valve’s numbers.
Image Credits: Valve
The system is up for preorder now and starts shipping this December, in time for the holidays.
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Extra Crunch roundup: Video pitch decks, Didi’s regulatory struggles, Nothing CEO interview
The numbers don’t lie.
According to DocSend, the average pitch deck is reviewed for just three minutes. And if you think a senior VC is studying the presentation your team crafted for months as if it were a Fabergé egg — well, you might be disappointed.
Even if you are lucky enough to land a meeting, it’s more likely that a junior person went through your pitch and ran it up the chain.
“The biggest lie in venture capital is: ‘Yes, I read through your deck,’” says Evan Fisher, founder of Unicorn Capital and Minimal Capital.
“Because those words are immediately followed by, ‘ … but why don’t you run us through it from the beginning?’”
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According to Fisher, the pro forma pitch deck is a thing of the past. Instead, the founders he’s worked with who made video pitches netted two to five times as many investor meetings as people who sent traditional pitch decks.
They also received up to five times more in terms of investor commitments from the first 20 meetings.
“Even if the only benefit was that other investment committee members heard the story direct from the founder, that alone would make your video pitch worth it,” says Fisher.
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week!
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
Nothing founder Carl Pei on Ear (1) and building a hardware startup from scratch
Image Credits: TechCrunch
In an exclusive interview with Hardware Editor Brian Heater, Nothing Founder Carl Pei discussed the product and design principles underpinning Ear (1), a set of US$99/€99/£99 wireless earbuds that will hit the market later this month.
“We’re starting with smart devices,” said Pei. “Ear (1) is our is our first device. I think it has good potential to gain some traction.”
Despite Apple’s market share and the number of players already competing in the space, “we’ve just focused on being ourselves,” said Nothing’s founder, who also shared initial marketing plans and discussed the inherent tensions involved with manufacturing consumer hardware.
“Everything is a trade-off. Like if you pursue this design, that has a ton of implications. Battery life has ton of implications on size and on cost. The materials you use have implications on cost. Everything has an implication on timeline. It’s like 4D chess in terms of trade-offs.”
Will Didi’s regulatory problems make it harder for Chinese startups to go public in the US?
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Last week, just days after its U.S. IPO, cybersecurity regulators in China banned ride-hailing company Didi from onboarding new members.
Over the weekend, authorities called for Didi to be removed from several app stores due to “serious violations of laws and regulations in collecting and using personal information.”
The move suggests that China’s government “is willing to sacrifice business results for control,” writes Alex Wilhelm in this morning’s edition of The Exchange.
“For China-based companies hoping to list in the United States, the market likely just got much, much colder.”
79% more leads without more traffic: Here’s how we did it
Image Credits: Peter Dazeley (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images
Jasper Kuria, the managing partner of CRO consultancy The Conversion Wizards, walks through an A/B test showing how research-driven CRO (conversion rate optimization) techniques led to a 79% increase in conversion rates for China Expat Health, a lead-generation company.
“Using research-based CRO principles to optimize a landing page for PPC (pay per click) traffic produced a 79% conversion lift, dramatically reducing the cost per lead for the company,” Kuria writes.
“They could then afford to bid more per click, which increased their overall monthly leads. CRO can have this kind of transformative effect on your business.”
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