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Uber sells self-driving unit Uber ATG in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B
Aurora Innovation, the autonomous vehicle startup backed by Sequoia Capital and Amazon, has reached an agreement with Uber to buy the ride-hailing firm’s self-driving unit in a complex deal that will value the combined company at $10 billion.
Aurora is not paying cash for Uber ATG, a company that was valued at $7.25 billion following a $1 billion investment last year from Toyota, DENSO and SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Instead, Uber is handing over its equity in ATG and investing $400 million into Aurora, which will give it a 26% stake in the combined company, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (As a refresher, Uber held an 86.2% stake (on a fully diluted basis) in Uber ATG, according to filings with the SEC. Uber ATG’s investors held a combined stake of 13.8% in the company.) Shareholders in Uber ATG will now become minority shareholders of Aurora. Notably, once the deal closes, Uber together with existing ATG investors and the ATG employees who continue their employment with Aurora are expected to collectively hold about 40% interest in Aurora on a fully diluted basis.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will take a board seat in the newly expanded Aurora.
Aurora, which was founded in 2017, is focused on building the full self-driving stack, the underlying technology that will allow vehicles to navigate highways and city streets without a human driver behind the wheel. Aurora has attracted attention and investment from high-profile venture firms, management firms and corporations such as Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Amazon and T. Rowe Price, in part because of its founders Sterling Anderson, Drew Bagnell and Chris Urmson, all of whom are veterans of the autonomous vehicle industry.
Urmson led the former Google self-driving project before it spun out to become the Alphabet business Waymo. Anderson is best known for leading the development and launch of the Tesla Model X and the automaker’s Autopilot program. Bagnell, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon, helped launch Uber’s efforts in autonomy, ultimately heading the autonomy and perception team at the Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh.
Aurora plans to bring autonomous trucks to market first. However, Urmson has maintained that the company is still pursuing other applications of its self-driving stack such as robotaxis. The deal with Uber ATG provides Aurora with talent and operational facilities. But it delivers on two other important areas: relationships with Uber ATG investors, specifically Toyota, as well as a partnership with Uber that will give it access to its vast ride-hailing platform.
“The way we want to build this company has been with this mindset of let’s build it to scale — let’s create an environment where people can do their best work,” Urmson said in an interview Monday. “And then let’s go look for great teams and bring them in. It’s one way to get a combination of talent and technology, and in this case, also relationships.”
The announcement, which confirms TechCrunch’s reporting in November, marks the beginning of what promises to be a huge undertaking to merge Uber ATG, a 1,200-person business unit with operations in Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto with its smaller competitor.
It’s not clear if all Uber ATG employees will be folded into Aurora, which has 600-person workforce and operations in San Francisco Bay Area, Pittsburgh, Texas and Bozeman, Montana. At least one executive — Uber ATG CEO Eric Meyhofer — will not be joining the company.
Urmson emphasized that work to integrate the companies and their technology will begin without haste.
“One of the most fun things we’ll be doing over the next 60 days is bringing the two teams together,” Urmson said. “And then kind of dispassionately looking at what is the technology that accelerates our first product to market and then amplifying that — whether it’s from the existing Aurora team or to the new Aurora team — and pushing that forward, whether it’s ideas or code or bits of hardware together to accelerate our time to market.”
The company plans to assess the workforce and technology as quickly as possible, Urmson said.
Uber’s AV history
For Uber, the deal marks one of the last expensive pursuits that it had yet to either spin or sell off as the company narrowed in on its core businesses of ride-hailing and delivery. In the past year, Uber has dumped shared micromobility unit Jump, sold a stake in its growing but still unprofitable logistics arm, Uber Freight and acquired Postmates. Uber is also reportedly in talks to sell off its autonomous air taxi business Uber Elevate.
Uber ATG was one of those businesses that promised financial benefits in the long term, but delivered lots of pain, controversy and upfront costs since almost the moment it was created.
In early 2015, Uber kicked off its pursuit of autonomous vehicles when it announced a strategic partnership with Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Center. The agreement to work on developing driverless car technology resulted in Uber poaching dozens of NREC researchers and scientists. A year later, Uber acquired a self-driving truck startup called Otto, a startup founded by one of Google’s star engineers, Anthony Levandowski, along with three other Google veterans: Lior Ron, Claire Delaunay and Don Burnette.
Two months after the acquisition, Google made two arbitration demands against Levandowski and Ron. Uber wasn’t a party to either arbitration. While the arbitrations played out, Waymo separately filed a lawsuit against Uber in February 2017 for trade secret theft and patent infringement. Waymo alleged in the suit, which went to trial but ended in a settlement in 2018, that Levandowski stole trade secrets, which were then used by Uber.
With the trial over, Uber pressed on, but almost immediately was involved in another deadlier controversy when one of its autonomous test vehicles — which had a human safety driver behind the wheel — struck and killed a pedestrian in March 2018. The entire industry took pause and Uber halted all testing.
Uber spun out Uber ATG in spring 2019 after closing $1 billion in funding from Toyota, auto parts maker Denso and SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Even with the spin off, Uber still faced a costly enterprise. Uber reported in November that ATG and “other technologies” (which includes Uber Elevate) had a net loss of $303 million in the nine months that ended September 30, 2020. In its S-1 document, Uber said it incurred $457 million of research and development expenses for its ATG and “other Technology Programs” initiatives.
What Aurora values
Despite the trail of problems that have plagued Uber ATG, Urmson insists that the company has the talent and some interesting technology that makes it a worthy asset.
“Some of the work they’ve been doing in designing their next-generation hardware for the vehicles is exciting and interesting,” he said. “On the software side, they have really cool stuff in prediction, and how they’ve combined prediction and the perception system together.”
Others close to the deal said Uber ATG has valuable and talented mid-level and low-level engineers, making the acquisition particularly appealing to Aurora.
This is not Aurora’s first acquisition, although it is certainly its largest and most complex. In 2019, Aurora acquired Blackmore, a Bozeman, Montana-based lidar company, and simulation startup 7D Labs. Aurora has touted its “no jerks” policy and its company culture, which is now about to absorb hundreds of new people.
Post-merger integrations can take months, even years, which can in turn slow down technological or operational progress. Urmson thinks differently.
“If anything, this accelerates our objectives,” he said.
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Lime touts a 2020 turnaround and 2021 profitability
Micromobility company Lime says it has moved beyond the financial hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching a milestone that seemed unthinkable earlier this year.
In short, the company is now largely profitable.
Lime said it was both operating cash flow positive and free cash flow positive in the third quarter — a first — and is on pace to be full-year profitable, excluding certain costs (EBIT), in 2021.
During the WSJ Future of Everything event Thursday, Lime CEO Wayne Ting painted a far rosier picture of the company’s future than one might have expected.
There was a time when Bird and Lime, competing domestic scooter rental companies, were raising capital at a torrid pace, fighting for market share, regulatory breathing room and sidewalk real estate. Then, the pandemic hit and the companies had to take shelter.
Lime underwent a round of layoffs in April, taking on capital from Uber the next month in a down-round that brought its valuation under the $1 billion mark. As it announced in a blog post that TechCrunch reviewed before publication, it paused most of its operations for a month during the early COVID-19 days.
“It was certainly a very, very tough decision for us earlier this year and I know we weren’t the only company during COVID,” Ting said during the event. “I think it’s been in so many ways helpful to us to realize how hard these choices can be. We’re going to be growing headcount again. We’re going to do so in a careful way so that we’re not going have to make hard choices like the ones we made earlier this year.”
Now things are better, Lime says. Much better. Indeed, the company claims that it is the “first new mobility company to reach cash-flow positive for a full quarter.”
Cash flow positivity, in general, is an important threshold for a startup to reach as it implies that the company can largely self-fund from that point forward, limiting its dependency on external cash for survival.
Lime also claims that it “reached EBIT positive at the company level over the summer.” The specifics of the phrase “EBIT positive” are important. Was the company employing strict EBIT on its math and not discounting share-based compensation, or was it measuring using adjusted EBIT as many startups do, removing the cost of share-based compensation that shows up in GAAP results? According to the company the number did exclude share-based compensation, making the news slightly smaller.
Perhaps the most bullish data point from Lime is that it expects to be full-year profitable in 2021. TechCrunch asked for specifics because again how one measures profitability matters. It turns out, Lime is basing this projection on EBIT, as opposed to more traditional net income. For a startup this is not a surprising decision, but before we declare Lime fully “profitable,” we’ll want some more GAAP metrics.
Still, it appears that Lime is not going to die, and is, importantly, putting capital into developing new products. The company provided the first example of that new product pipeline on Thursday with the launch of the Gen4 scooter in Paris. It also teased a so-called “third and fourth mode” in the first quarter of 2021 as well as the addition of a swappable battery.
The scooter company wouldn’t give TechCrunch much information about what these third and fourth modes will be. The first two modes are bikes and scooters, which leaves skateboards, cars, flying cars and boats?
Lime did give TechCrunch a little bit of clarification, stating that “move beyond,” means the company will be operating an additional mode, accessed through the Lime app, in line with its goal to serve any trips under five miles. These modes will build on the Lime Platform play, but this will be operated by Lime rather than a partner.
Lime has long discussed reaching profitability. Perhaps because it and its competitor Bird were infamous for their losses during their early unicorn period.
By November of 2019, Lime was talking about reaching EBIT positivity in 2020. But the start of 2020 was not kind on the company, with 100 of its staff losing their jobs and 12 markets getting dropped. At the time TechCrunch wrote that “Lime is hoping to achieve profitability this year by laying off about 14% of its workforce and ceasing operations in 12 markets,” with the company itself writing at the time that “financial independence [was its] goal for 2020, and [that it was] confident that Lime will be the first next-generation mobility company to reach profitability.”
Depending on how you measure profitability, that could be true.
Things didn’t get easier for Lime later in the year. Its competitor Bird underwent layoffs, and Lime cut more staff in April. At the time, Lime said that it was focused on coming “back stronger than ever when this is over.”
The company is certainly in better shape than it was in April and May. So, how did Lime come back from the brink? In its own estimation, the company took time during its pause to “drill down on getting the business right, narrowing [its] focus and strengthening [its] fundamentals.” That might sound like corporate babble, but by taking a nearly full stop in its operating business, Lime could probably see a bit more clearly what was working and what was not. And with some cuts to what wasn’t, it could set up a future in which its operations were leaner, and more unit-economically positive.
And, now, here we are asking niggling questions about just what sort of profit Lime is really making. Instead of, you know, who might buy its leftover office furniture. It’s a nice turnaround.
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Nana nabs $6M for an online academy and marketplace dedicated to appliance repair
A lot of the focus in online education — and, let’s face it, education overall — has been about professional development for knowledge workers, education for K-12 and how best to deliver cost-effective, engaging higher learning to those in college and beyond. But in what might be a sign of the times, today a startup that’s focused on e-learning and the subsequent job market for a completely different end of the spectrum — home services — is announcing some funding to continue building out its business in earnest.
Nana, which runs a free academy to teach people how to fix appliances, and then gives students the option of becoming a part of its own marketplace to connect them to people needing repairs — has picked up $6 million.
The seed round is being led by Shripriya Mahesh of Spero Ventures; Next Play Ventures (ex-LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner’s new fund), Lachy Groom, Scott Belsky, Geoff Donaker of Burst Capital and Michael Staton of Learn Capital are among those also participating.
Nana has now raised $10.7 million, with past backers including Alpha Bridge Ventures, Bob Lee and the Uber Syndicate, an investment vehicle to back Uber alums in new ventures. Founder and CEO David Zamir is not actually an Uber alum, but one of his first employees, VP of Engineering Oliver Nicholas is an early Uber engineer and the company has also found a lot of traction of Uber drivers this year, after many found themselves out of work after the chilling effect that the pandemic had on ridesharing.
Nana — full name Nana Technologies (and not to be confused with Nana Technology, tech built for older adults) — is partly a labor/future of work play, partly an educational play, partly a tech/IoT play and partly an ecological play, in the eyes of Zamir, who himself trained as an appliance repairperson, running his own successful business in the Bay Area before pivoting it into a training platform and marketplace.
“There are 5.9 million tons of municipal solid waste [which includes lots of electronics like washing machines, blenders and everything in between] in the U.S.,” he said in an interview, “and only 50% of that is capable of getting recycled. We’re in a vicious cycle with appliances, and it’s partly because there aren’t enough people with the knowledge to repair them. But what if you had the liquidity to do that? We’re talking about creating jobs, but also saving the environment.”
Nana’s proposition starts with free lessons to fix a range of appliances — currently dishwashers, refrigerators, ovens, stoves, washers and dryers — and their typical breakdown/poor performance issues to anyone who wants to know how to repair them. These classes are available to anyone — an individual simply interested in learning how to fix a machine, but more likely someone looking to pick up a skill and then use it to make some money.
Once you take and pass a course — currently remote — you have the option (but not requirement) to register on Nana’s platform to become a repair person who picks up jobs through it to get jobs fixing that particular issue. Nana already has partnerships with major appliance and warranty companies, including GE, Miele, Samsung, Assurant, Cinch and First American Home Warranty, so this is how it gets most of its work in, but it also accepts direct requests from consumers for repair of dishwashers, refrigerators, ovens, stoves, washers and dryers.
Over time, Zamir said, the plan is not just to take in jobs and send out technicians to fix things in an Uber-style dispatch service — but to expand it to fit the kinds of next-generation appliances that are being built today, with IoT diagnostic monitoring and helping also to integrate these appliances into connected homes. It also seems to be slowly expanding into other home services too, alongside appliance repair (which remains its main business).
Nana has to date registered hundreds of technicians in 12 markets across the U.S. and said it expects to expand to 20 markets by the end of 2021.
Nana has an unlikely founder story that speaks to how so much of the tech world is still about hustle and finding opportunities in the margins.
Founder and CEO David Zamir hails from Israel, but unlike many of the transplants you may come across from there to the Bay Area tech world, he’s not a tech guy by education, training or work experience. He used to run clothing stores in Tel Aviv and vaguely liked the idea of being involved in a tech business at some point — Israel loves to call itself “startup nation,” so that bug is bound to bite even those who don’t study computer science or engineering — but he didn’t know what to do or where to begin.
“The clothing business didn’t make much money,” he said. So after a period Zamir and his American wife decided to move to the U.S. and try their luck there.
While initially based on the east coast near her family and wondering about what kind of job to pursue, Zamir spoke with a friend of his in Toronto who was working as an independent tradesperson fixing appliances, and the friend suggested this as an option, at least for a while.
“So I hopped on an airplane to shadow my friend,” he recalled. “The lightbulb went off. I thought, I should do this in San Francisco,” where he had been wanting to move to crack in to the tech world, somehow. “I thought that I’d start with fixing appliances while I figured out how to find my way into tech.”
That turned into more than a temporary income stopgap, of course. After finding that his business was taking off, Zamir saw that technology would be the avenue to growing it.
He was helped in part to build the idea and the business through his grit. Josh Elman, the famous tech investor, complained about a broken dryer back in April, and asked the Twitter hive mind whether he should get a new one or go through the pain of fixing it. Someone flagged the question to Zamir, who reached out and connected Elman with one of Nana’s online teaching technicians. Twelve hours later, Elman’s drier was diagnosed (by Elman), on its way to getting fixed, and Elman signed on as an advisor to the company.
Move fast and fix things
The world of tech is all about building new things and solving problems, with “breaking” being more synonymous with disruption (= “good”) and fearlessness (see: Facebook’s old mantra to its early employees to move fast and break things). But behind that, there is an interesting disconnect between the tech version of “broken” and objects that are actually “broken” in the real world.
Many of us these days find using apps and other digital interfaces second-nature, but most of us would have no idea how to repair or work with much more basic electronic systems. And nor do most of us want to. More often than not, we give up on it, decide it’s not worth fixing and click on Amazon et al. to get a new shiny object.
Looked at on a wider scale, this is actually a big problem.
Electronics can be recycled, but in reality only about half the materials can be usefully reused. Meanwhile, Nana estimates that the appliance repair market is a $4 billion opportunity, with some 80 million appliances in need of being serviced annually in the U.S. But currently there are only some 31,000 trained technicians in the market. Nana estimates that to meet the demand of growing numbers, an additional 28,000 new technicians will be needed by 2025.
At the same time, the move to automation in many skilled labor jobs is putting people out of work: research from the Brookings Institution estimates that some 30 million people will lose their jobs in coming years because of it.
The idea here is that a platform like Nana can help some of those people retrain to fill the gap for appliance technicians, while at the same time extending the life of people’s appliances in a less painful way — putting less stuff into landfill — while at the same time expanding knowledge for anyone who cares for it.
Zamir said that Nana was named after his mother, who raised David as a single parent after his father passed away, a reference to working hard and being practical.
That sentimentality seems to motivate him in a bigger way, too: Zamir himself is a guy with a lot of heart and emotion vested into the concept of his startup. When I told him an anecdote of how our dishwasher broke down earlier this year and both a customer service rep from the maker (Siemens) and a separate repair person advised me to replace it, he got visibly agitated over our video call, as if the subject was something political or significantly more grave than a story about a dishwasher.
“I am not a supporter of what they told you,” he said in an angry voice. “It’s really upsetting me.” (I calmed him down a little, I think, when I told him that I myself uninstalled the broken dishwasher and installed the new one myself, because COVID.)
Zamir said that there are no plans to charge for its academy courses, nor to tie people into signing up with Nana to work once they take the courses. The fact that it provides a lot of inbound jobs attracts enough turnover — between 40% and 60% of those taking courses stay on to work when they took in-person classes, and for now the online figures are between 15% and 35%.
“It’s still early days,” he said, “but we’re finding the take up impressive… Most want to participate in the marketplace.” He says that there are other call-out services where they could register, but the tech that Nana has built makes its system more efficient, and that means better returns.
All of this has played well with those who have become Nana’s investors. People like Jeff Weiner — who in his time as CEO of LinkedIn led the company to acquire Lynda as part of a bigger emphasis on the importance of skills training and education — see the opportunity and need to provide an equivalent platform not just for knowledge workers but those who have more manual jobs, too.
“We are excited by Nana’s vision of providing training, access and opportunity for rewarding, satisfying work while also filling a critical gap in our economy,” said Shripriya Mahesh of Spero Ventures, in a statement. “Nana has created a new, scalable approach to giving people the agency, tools and support systems they need to build new skills and pursue fulfilling work opportunities.”
The round was oversubscribed in the end, and Nana shouldn’t find it too hard to raise again if it sticks to its plan and the market continues to grow as it has. That does not seem to be the motivation for Zamir, though.
“We just think it’s super important to build Nana for the people,” he said.
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What happens to high-flying startups if the pandemic trade flips?
So much can change in a day.
This morning, news that a trial COVID-19 vaccine candidate had an effective rate of more than 90% shook the financial world. The Pfizer vaccine is reportedly so effective, the company “will have manufactured enough doses to immunize 15 to 20 million people” by the end of the year, according to the New York Times, appears to have given investors the green light to pile back into companies harmed by the pandemic.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
The shift of money from shares that proved popular during the summer is massive and abrupt. Zoom and Peloton are down sharply this morning, while Uber and Lyft are soaring. Indeed, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 indices are up around 4.8% and 3.3% respectively, while SaaS and cloud share are off 3.5%.
Investors are taking money out of companies that were expected to do well thanks to the pandemic and moving that capital into firms that were weakened by the pandemic.
Our question for this morning: what do these changes mean for the economic forces that have broadly favored venture-backed startups? What happens to high-flying startups if the pandemic trade flips? What’s next for insurtech, edtech, fintech and SaaS? Let’s discuss.
Hot sectors, warm futures?
Short-term market movements do not always predict the future accurately, so we should not treat today’s trading as gospel.
That said, it’s not hard to draw some basic conclusions from the trading activity. Here’s what I think we can deduce from today’s stock market activity:
- Corporate software spend growth will slow: The broad decline in the value of software companies today appears to indicate that investors expect slower growth in the future. This is especially sharp in companies boosted by the pandemic itself, and, it appears, less acute in companies that were less helped by the COVID-19 economy. Our read? Investors are betting that growth amongst the companies that most benefited from a switch to remote work, for example, will see the greatest deceleration from recent forecasts. For startups, the lesson here is plain. Go look at your public comps and consider your own valuation likely trading along similar lines.
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As tech stocks rally, bring on the IPOs
During yesterday’s tense voting and this morning, shares of American-listed technology companies are shooting higher.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite is up around 3.35% this morning, more than double what the broad S&P 500 index is currently managing. SaaS and cloud stocks kicked off the day up a staggering 4.98%, a sharp rally in the value of smaller, more growth-oriented technology companies.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
For technology companies on the wings of the IPO market, it’s great news.
In 2020 it can be easy to forget, but tech stocks do not have to rise. They merely have in recent months, perhaps warming the waters for more technology debuts as the fourth quarter races toward its midpoint. The Exchange has heard whispers from several folks that the late-November/early-December period could be active for new filings, bringing rising stocks and pent-up demand together for a possible IPO run.
We’ll see. Today’s rally — and ballot measure results in California — could be the push companies like Airbnb and DoorDash needed to stop faffing around with private filings.
In pedestrian terms, the getting is good right now for public tech companies, so if you are going to go public, go get got while the getting stays good.
Today, let’s examine recent market gains for tech stocks and remind ourselves who is expected to go public next. Then, of course, chat about all the unicorns on the unofficial IPO list who could find a greased path ahead of them toward a flotation.
Gains
Big tech stocks are gaining, small stocks are up and software companies are hot. The NASDAQ is now less than 5% away from its all-time highs, and the Bessemer Cloud Index is now just 9% down from its own, a rebound from its prior status in correction territory. (A correction occurs when an index falls 10% or more from highs.)
So, who does the rally help? Let’s rock through a list:
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Temporal raises $18.75M for its microservices orchestration platform
Temporal, a Seattle-based startup that is building an open-source, stateful microservices orchestration platform, today announced that it has raised an $18.75 million Series A round led by Sequoia Capital. Existing investors Addition Ventures and Amplify Partners also joined, together with new investor Madrona Venture Group. With this, the company has now raised a total of $25.5 million.
Founded by Maxim Fateev (CEO) and Samar Abbas (CTO), who created the open-source Cadence orchestration engine during their time at Uber, Temporal aims to make it easier for developers and operators to run microservices in production. Current users include the likes of Box and Snap.
“Before microservices, coding applications was much simpler,” Temporal’s Fateev told me. “Resources were always located in the same place — the monolith server with a single DB — which meant developers didn’t have to codify a bunch of guessing about where things were. Microservices, on the other hand, are highly distributed, which means developers need to coordinate changes across a number of servers in different physical locations.”
Those servers could go down at any time, so engineers often spend a lot of time building custom reliability code to make calls to these services. As Fateev argues, that’s table stakes and doesn’t help these developers create something that builds real business value. Temporal gives these developers access to a set of what the team calls “reliability primitives” that handle these use cases. “This means developers spend far more time writing differentiated code for their business and end up with a more reliable application than they could have built themselves,” said Fateev.
Temporal’s target use is virtually any developer who works with microservices — and wants them to be reliable. Because of this, the company’s tool — despite offering a read-only web-based user interface for administering and monitoring the system — isn’t the main focus here. The company also doesn’t have any plans to create a no-code/low-code workflow builder, Fateev tells me. However, since it is open-source, quite a few Temporal users build their own solutions on top of it.
The company itself plans to offer a cloud-based Temporal-as-a-Service offering soon. Interestingly, Fateev tells me that the team isn’t looking at offering enterprise support or licensing in the near future. “After spending a lot of time thinking it over, we decided a hosted offering was best for the open-source community and long-term growth of the business,” he said.
Unsurprisingly, the company plans to use the new funding to improve its existing tool and build out this cloud service, with plans to launch it into general availability next year. At the same time, the team plans to say true to its open-source roots and host events and provide more resources to its community.
“Temporal enables Snapchat to focus on building the business logic of a robust asynchronous API system without requiring a complex state management infrastructure,” said Steven Sun, Snap Tech Lead, Staff Software Engineer. “This has improved the efficiency of launching our services for the Snapchat community.”
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With $18M in new funding, Braintrust says it’s creating a fairer model for freelancers
Braintrust, a network for freelance technical and design talent that launched over the summer, is announcing that it has raised $18 million in new funding.
Co-founder and CEO Adam Jackson has written for TechCrunch about how tech companies need to treat independent contractors with more empathy. He told me via email that the San Francisco-based startup is making that idea a reality by offering a very different approach than existing marketplaces for freelance work.
For one thing, Braintrust only charges the companies doing the hiring — freelancers won’t have to pay to join or to bid on a project, and Braintrust won’t charge a fee on their project payments. In addition, the startup is using a cryptocurrency token that it calls Btrust to reward users who build the network, for example by inviting new customers or vetting freelancers. Apparently, the token will give users a stake in how the network evolves in the future.
“Just imagine if Uber had given all of its drivers some ownership in the company what a different company it would be today,” Jackson said. “Braintrust will be 100% user-owned. Everyone who participates on the platform has skin in the game.”
And for companies, Braintrust is supposed to allow them to tap freelancers for work that they’d normally do in-house. The startup’s clients already include Nestlé, Pacific Life, Deloitte, Porsche, Blue Cross Blue Shield and TaskRabbit.
According to Jackson, most of the talent on the platform consists of career freelancers, but with many people losing their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, “we’ve seen an influx of talent coming looking to join the ranks of the freelancers.”
He added that the startup already became profitable after raising its $6 million seed round, so the new funding will allow it to build the core team and also bring in more work.
“We exist to help companies accelerate their product roadmaps and innovation, and this injection of funding will help us do just that,” Jackson said.
The new funding was led by ACME and Blockchange, with participation from new investors Pantera, Multicoin and Variant.
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Final week to score $50 student passes to TC Sessions: Mobility 2020
Class is about to be in session, students. If you’re passionate about mobility and transportation tech and hungry to learn from the visionaries, makers and investors who are building the future today, don’t miss out on TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 on October 6-7.
We support you, the next generation of mobility tech leaders, so take advantage of our $50 student pass — a $145 savings. But don’t delay. The price increases on October 5.
TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 offers two days packed with 1:1 interviews and panel discussions with the people at the top of game — the leaders, movers and shakers who continue to push beyond what seems possible. You won’t just hear from them, you’ll engage with them during a series of Q&A breakout sessions.
Whether you’re focused on micromobility, connected data, EVs or regulatory trends, you’ll find it — and much more — across the main stage, breakout sessions and sponsored sessions. Here’s a taste of what to expect. Be sure to study the event agenda and start strategizing your schedule now.
Driving the Mobility Revolution with Connected Car Data: Bret Scott, Wejo VP, discusses the future of mobility and how connected car data impacts the world of autonomous, electric and shared cars.
Software Is Revolutionizing the Driver Experience and Driving Mass Electrification: Software in EVs enables a shift from buying a car to investing in an experience. ChargePoint CEO Pasquale Romano discusses how it’s driving adoption, revolutionizing behavior and keeping up with demand.
Uber’s City Footprint: Uber touches many aspects of the transportation ecosystem — autonomous vehicles, food delivery, trucking and traditional ride-hailing. Director of Policy, Cities & Transportation Shin-pei Tsay discusses Uber’s place in cities and how she navigates various regulatory frameworks.
This virtual conference draws a global audience and thousands of attendees. Talk about the perfect place to build your network — an essential part of any successful career. Find that dream internship or exciting employment opportunities and explore more than 40 early-stage mobility startups in the expo area.
Take advantage of CrunchMatch, our free AI-enhanced networking platform. It’s an easy-to-use tool to find and connect with the people who can help you advance your startup aspirations. Stay focused and organized as you schedule 1:1 meetings, meet founders, pitch investors, discuss your resume and otherwise impress the pants off influential people.
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Postmates cuts losses in Q2 as it heads towards tie-up with Uber
Popular food delivery service Postmates is in the process of merging with Uber in a blockbuster $2.65 billion deal that would see it join forces with its food delivery competitor, Uber Eats. The deal remains under antitrust scrutiny, and has not yet been approved for closing. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2021.
However, a new SEC filing posted after hours this Friday gives us a glimpse into how Postmates is faring in the new world of global pandemics and sit-in dining closures across the United States.
Postmates posted a loss of just $32.2 million in Q2, compared to a loss of $73 million in Q1, nearly cutting its cash burning in half. That compares to Uber Eats’ results, which showed a loss of $286 million in the first quarter of 2020 and a loss of $232 million in the second quarter — an improvement of roughly 20%, according to Uber’s most recent financial reports.
Altogether, Postmates lost $105.2 million in the first half of 2020, compared to a loss of $239 million in the same period of 2019.
Uber through its filing today also disclosed the cap table for Postmates in full detail for the first time. On a fully diluted basis, the largest shareholder in Postmates is Tiger Global, which owns 27.2% of the company. Following up is Founders Fund with 11.4%, Spark Capital with 6.9% and GPI Capital with 5.3%. At Uber’s $2.65 billion all-stock deal, that nets Tiger Global roughly $720 million and Founders Fund roughly $302 million, not including some stock preferences and dividends that certain owners of the company hold.
While Postmates and Uber continue to go through the antitrust review process at the federal level, the companies also face legal pressure in their own backyards. Uber noted in its filing today that it and Postmates face headwinds due to California’s AB 5 bill, which is designed to give additional employment protections to freelance workers. However, the company notes that such litigation “may not, in and of itself, give rise to a right of either party to terminate the transaction.”
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Tech must radically rethink how it treats independent contractors
Adam Jackson is the CEO of Braintrust, the first user-controlled talent network that connects organizations with world-class tech talent. He also co-founded telemedicine company Doctor On Demand and blockchain-focused digital asset management company Cambrian Asset Management.
Despite a surging stock market and many major tech players having record quarters, we’re still seeing layoffs throughout tech and the rest of corporate America. Salesforce recorded a huge quarter, passing $5 billion in revenue, only to lay off around 1000 people. LinkedIn is laying off 960 people one day after reporting a 10% increase in revenue.
These layoffs may seem like a contraction in size for these huge enterprises, but it’s actually the beginning of something I call The Great Unbundling of Corporate America. They still need to grow, they still need to innovate, they still need to get work done and they’re not simply canceling projects and giving up on contracts.
Just as COVID-19 has accelerated the move to remote work, our current crisis has accelerated the trend toward hiring independent contractors. Back in 2019 a New York Times report found that Google had a shadow workforce of 121,000 temporary workers and contractors, overshadowing their 102,000 full-timers. ZipRecruiter reported in 2018 that tech, along with its record employment growth, was showing an increasing share of listings for independent contractors.
A study from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that between 6.9% and 9.6% of all workers are now independent contractors, and according to Upwork, that may be as high as 35%. Mark my words — companies are using this time as an opportunity to swing the pendulum toward independent contractors and trimming the fat, justifying it with a vague gesture toward “an unprecedented time.”
That’s why, in my opinion, you’re seeing the NASDAQ hitting record highs despite everyone’s turmoil — depressingly, investors can see that large companies are tightening up and cleaning up waste, while finding an affordable workforce at will. As they have unbundled themselves from our physical offices, large enterprises are going to unbundle themselves from having to have a set number of employees.
When Square allowed its entire workforce to work remotely permanently. It wasn’t just because they wanted them to feel more creative and productive, but was likely a move away from having quite as much expensive, needless office space.
Similarly, if there is work that a full-time employee does that could be done by a flexible, independent contractor, why not make that change too? And it’ll be a lot easier to make without as many people at the office.
The argument I’m making is not anti-contractor, though.
I can’t think of any point in history where it’s been better to create a freelance business — the startup costs are significantly lower, and as companies move toward remote work, you can theoretically take business nationally (or internationally) like never before. Companies’ moves toward replacing W-2 workers with contractors is an opportunity for people to create their own miniature freelance empires, unbundling themselves from corporate America’s required hours, and potentially creating a way to weather future storms by taking away any single company’s leverage on their income.
The rush to remote work is also likely to push more workers into the freelance economy too. By having to create a remote office, with a remote presence in meetings and having to manage and organize our days, the average worker has all but adjusted to the life of a freelancer.
Where some might have gone to an office and had things simply happen to them, the remote world requires an attention to your calendar and active outreach to colleagues that, well, models how one might run a freelance business. Those with core skillsets that can be marketed and sold to multiple clients should be thinking about whether being a wage slave is necessary anymore, and with good reason.
That said — corporate America, and especially tech, has to treat this essential workforce with a great deal more empathy and respect than they have thus far.
Uber and Lyft were ordered to treat drivers as employees in part due to the fact that they never treated their contractors like parts of the company. Other than the obvious lack of benefits (paid time off, health insurance, etc.), Uber, like many large enterprises, treats contractors as disposable rather than flexible, despite them being the literal driving force of the company. When Uber went public, they gave a nominal bonus for drivers that had completed 2500 to 40,000 trips, with a chance to buy up to $10,000 of stock — at the IPO price. These drivers, that had been the very reason that many people became millionaires and billionaires when Uber went public, were given the chance to maybe make money, if they sold the stock quickly enough.
It’s an abject lesson on how to not build loyalty with independent contractors. It’s also a lesson on what the next big company that wants to build themselves off the back of the 1099’er should do.
What I’m suggesting is a radical rethinking of freelance contracting. I want you to see independent contractors as a different kind of worker, not as a way of skirting getting a full-time employee. A freelancer, by definition, is someone that you don’t monopolize, and someone that you should actively give agency and, indeed, part of the network you’re building. One of the issues of corporate America’s approach to freelance work is an us-versus-them approach to employment — you’re either part of us or you’re simply a thing we pick up and put down. What I’m suggesting is treating your freelancers as an essential part of your strategy, and compensating them as such. Freelancers should own equity and should have skin in the game — they may be working with you on a number of projects and take literal ownership of vast successes throughout your history.
Contracted work has only become mercenary through the treatment of the freelance worker. Where tech has succeeded in creating hundreds of thousands of independent contractor positions, it also has to lead the way in reimagining how we may treat them and reward them for their work. And corporate America needs to take a step beyond simply seeing them as a cheaper, easier way to do business. They’re so much more.
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