The Sonos One wasn’t broken, but that doesn’t mean the company’s is above fixing it. Over two generations and a few variants, the compact speaker has become one of the company’s most popular. Really, it’s been a big win for a firm whose portfolio can give off a whiff of inaccessibility, compared to other connected home speakers.

It sounds great at a $179 price point, and has accordingly become a popular choice for home sound systems, restaurants and retail stores. But six years after the original Sonos One release, the company is effectively calling an end of life to the product to make way for the Era 100. The older model will stick around for a bit, however, because — much like the new HomePods — the new speaker isn’t backward compatible with its predecessor, in terms of making a stereo pair.

Like Apple, Sonos says differences in hardware make the two systems uneven and therefore incompatible, in terms of pairing. The upshot (or, rather, one of the upshots), is that — unlike the Sonos One — the Era 100 does stereo as a standalone. That’s a much welcome breakthrough, obviously.

The new speaker sports a pair of angled tweeters and a larger mid-woofer than its predecessor. The on-board microphones are used for echo canceling, voice control and Trueplay tuning, which measures the layout of a room and distance from a wall to optimize the sound. There’s also a physical switch on the device to shut off power to the mic, so it’s not listening when you don’t want it to be.

The on-board LED light will let you know if the mic is on and offer up connection and mute status. Buttons on top of the system include play/pause, skip, replay, voice assistant mute and the ability to pair or unpair devices. Around the rear is a connector that can be used as an auxiliary line or ethernet port with the right adapter.

At 7.18 x 4.72 x 5.14 inches, the Era 100 is a bit larger than the Sonos One (6.36 x 4.69 x 4.69 ) in all dimensions. At 4.44 pounds, it’s also 0.36 pounds heavier. That’s probably to be expected, given the upgraded internals here. Besides, I’d say that still qualifies the system as “compact.” Compare that to the second-gen HomePod’s 6.6-inch height and 5.60-inch diameter, for example.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

The Era 100 is joined by the Era 300, Sonos’ first foray into spatial audio. I’ve expressed some skepticism at the feature in the past. You can read an interview I did with Sonos CEO Patrick Spence, where we discuss the tech in a bit more depth, including why the company decided only one of its two new speakers would feature it.

I asked a bit about spatial audio’s branding problem, and whether being associated with headphone tracking is working against the tech. He told me, in part:

As you’ve experienced [the speaker], it’s different than a headphone experience, where you’re moving your head and maybe you’ve got the screen over here. There are some things that I think have delighted people but also freaked out some people, in terms of that experience with headphones. It’s a little bit more gimmicky. Spatial out loud is really about filling the room and making you feel like you’re at the center of it. The right use of spatial is really out loud, versus headphones.

I also think, as recording engineers and artists started to learn what Spatial is all about, some of the early mixes weren’t great, in terms of missing things like vocals or missing a center. People will have tried that and not had a great experience. I would encourage those people to give it another listen.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

It’s true that a lot of modern music is being mixed with spatial audio in mind, and a number of streaming services, including Apple and Amazon Music, are embracing it (Spotify can’t really be bothered, it seems). The Era 300 looks different from the 100 precisely due to its embrace of the technology. The speaker sports six amplifiers pointed in different directions to accommodate that sense of sound in three-dimensions.

There are four tweeters (forward, two sides and up) and two woofers. Like the 100, it’s compatible with Wi-Fi 6 (mind, the HomePod is currently stuck on Wi-Fi 4 due to chip limitations), as well as Bluetooth 5. Both speakers are also compatible with AirPlay 2 to stream content from iOS devices running 11.4 or later. The 300 is larger than the 100 at 6.30 x 10..24 x 7.28 inches and more than twice as heavy, weighing in at 9.85 pounds.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Both systems have an eye on sustainability, with reduced power consumption and repurposed materials (the packaging is also made up of fully recycled paper). Just in time for a lot of right to repair legislation, they’re both designed to be more repairable, due in large part to a reduction of adhesives.

Spence again:

When we were first bringing out our products 20 years ago, we were like, “how do you build these things so they’ll make the sound you want?” So we had to use things like adhesives. We’ve been able to come up with ways and inventions that allow us to disassemble these products. It comes into our thinking more broadly about what we’re building and how you live up to the law of the land, but even before that, we were already starting to use recycled materials. We were already starting to use things that allow it to be more easily repaired.

The Era 100 and 300 start shipping on March 28, priced at $249 and $449, respectively.

Sonos replaces the One, adds a spatial audio speaker to lineup by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/sonos-replaces-the-one-adds-a-spatial-audio-speaker-to-lineup/

Did you know that 85% of all AI projects fail to reach the production or operation stage? Why is this the case?

It’s very common for businesses to come up with creative ideas to use AI to improve customer experience or simplify workflows. The barrier to success for these projects often resides in the time and resources it takes to get them into development and then into production. But, as we’ve seen with OpenAI’s new ChatGPT, AI can be as entertaining as it can be problematic.

With so many projects failing, or worse, being inaccurate, chances are that many of these companies are making the same mistakes. The following are some tips that will optimize your chances of success.

Start off on the right foot

The process of AI development suffers from poor planning, project management, and engineering problems. Most business leaders today learn about AI from the media, which often describes the value of AI as magic or as something that can be put into production with just a few sprinkles.

They believe implementing AI can help lower costs, improve margins and boost revenue. With competitors already in motion, it creates AI “FOMO” and executives are pushed to take action quickly despite not having a clear understanding of the overall impact, plan, cost and resources involved in creating a successful and accurate AI project.

With little understanding of the engineering environment, the first logical step should be hiring data scientists to map and plan the challenges that the team may face. However, these data scientists usually have no domain knowledge.

A data scientist entering a new organization with the goal of automating and improving the business will usually try to manually collect enough data to first prove there is value in creating AI. Once a successful proof of concept is made, the team often hits a wall regarding its data management. The organization may not collect, store or manage the data in a way that is “AI friendly.”

For example, a factory that wishes to embed smart fault inspection on a production assembly line will be able to demo the AI project pretty fast by using a single camera on a machine for a few minutes. However, for the project to get put into production and be used daily, it must transition the single-camera demo to 500 cameras operating 24/7. This will require many months or even years to bring the value the AI provides in the demo across the finish line.

Executives should, of course, have in mind a clear idea of the problem they want to solve as well as a business case. But the AI core team should include at least three personas, all of which will be equally important for the success of the project: data scientist, data engineer and domain expert.

A data-centric kickoff

While it may sound strange, the first AI project that is successful within an organization should not involve algorithms or fancy AI models. AI is essentially an effort to automate knowledge. Like all automation efforts, it’s good to start by showing the value of a few examples in a manual, slow and non-scalable manner.

In the kickoff, the data engineer will create a few cases using data and the domain expert will transform these case studies into examples. This step exposes the core of the AI process. The business will have raw data and a goal, and then they will want to get an example, which is the output data as it is ideally imagined.

This process is called data development, and the approach is data-centric by nature since no modeling is involved. This approach has many advantages over the model-first approach, such as

• it requires less investment;
• it utilizes the organization’s strengths (process, data, domain expertise);
• it is faster; and
• it lowers risk.

Once a few examples are completed manually, the business can start planning the AI’s path to production.

The best way to start an AI project? Don’t think about the models by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/the-best-way-to-start-an-ai-project-dont-think-about-the-models/

The hands of time are relentless, and so is the countdown to the biggest savings on passes to TechCrunch Disrupt — taking place September 19–21 in San Francisco. Here’s the thing: You have only four days left to save $1,000 on your pass. That bears repeating: Four days to save $1,000! Early action pays — embrace this save-now-go-later strategy.

How to save $1,000 on passes to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023

You’ll save $1,000 on General Admission, Founder and Investor passes. Students and nonprofits, purchase your pass for just $95 and save $180. If you want that massive ROI boost, you have to buy your Disrupt pass before Friday, March 10 at 11:59 p.m. PST.

Disrupt is where startups go to grow. It’s where the best and brightest founders, entrepreneurs, investors, hackers and tech fans gather to debut revolutionary startups and game-changing technologies. Across every stage at Disrupt, you’ll learn the latest insights and developments from tech’s leading founders, VCs and industry experts.

A call for content — speak at TechCrunch Disrupt

Speaking of experts, do you have what it takes to lead a breakout session or facilitate a roundtable discussion? Heed this call for content and apply here by April 21 to share your knowledge with founders, builders and entrepreneurs from across the startup spectrum.

TechCrunch will vet all applications and choose the finalists (by April 27) who will proceed to the Audience Choice voting round (May 1–12). TechCrunch readers (and your followers) will upvote the topics they want to see at Disrupt. We’ll notify the winners — who will present at Disrupt — by May 15.

TechCrunch Disrupt takes place in San Francisco on September 19–21. The relentless countdown continues, $1,000 in savings is on the line, and you have just four more days before prices increase. The deadline is Friday, March 10 at 11:59 p.m. PST. What are you waiting for? Buy your Disrupt pass today!

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Tick tock — 4 days left to save $1,000 on Disrupt passes by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/four-days-left-save-a-thousand-dollars-techcrunch-disrupt-2023/

Late last month, Artifact, a personalized news reader built by Instagram’s co-founders, opened to the public. The launch was a surprise to many consumers, who wondered why the team behind one of the world’s most iconic social apps would return to startups to focus on one of the toughest areas instead: news. It’s an ecosystem where publishers are failing left and right and misinformation is rampant, as the founders surely saw themselves while working at Facebook.

In an interview, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom explains what drew him to this space and how his new app’s underlying technology will serve to differentiate it from the competition.

The startup’s existence, in some ways, can be credited to the COVID pandemic, as that’s what brought the Instagram co-founders, Systrom and Mike Krieger, back together. During the early days of the pandemic in 2020, the co-founders teamed up for the first time since leaving Facebook to create a COVID-19 dashboard called Rt.live that tracked the spread of the virus across the U.S.

But in later months, other COVID trackers emerged and people were no longer as interested in tracking the virus’s spread on a state-by-state basis. Invigorated by the experience, the founders began then to think about returning to work on a “real company” instead of a public good side project.

Machine learning is the “future of social”

Deciding on their next act took time. The founders hacked around on stuff for a year and a half or so after their initial collaboration, Systrom says. The founder, who describes himself as a “very frameworks-driven person,” knew he wanted to do something that involved machine learning, having seen its power at Instagram.

“It was super fascinating to me to work on it at Instagram and watch it go from a company without machine learning to a company driven by machine learning,” he says. “I also witnessed the rise of TikTok and realized how important machine learning would be for the future of social.”

He himself observed how social networking’s underlying graph had changed a lot over the years, watching as Facebook invented what’s now known as the “friend graph” — a user’s personal social network of real-life connections. Later, he saw Twitter pioneer the “follow graph,” or a graph of connections based on the user’s explicit choices of who they want to follow on a service. Then, at Instagram, Systrom saw firsthand the shift from the “follow graph” to the “inferred graph” or, rather, the “interest graph.”

This, he explains, was basically a “follow graph” powered by machine learning, instead of by users clicking a button.

The potential to leverage machine learning and an interest graph within a new product appealed to him, he says.

“We looked for an area that was social in nature, but where we could apply 20% new techniques — and that would be the machine learning side of what we’re doing,” Systrom says, describing how the founders narrowed their focus.

Fixing a broken news ecosystem

Image Credits: jayk7 (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

The other consideration that prompted the founders’ interest in news, more specifically, was the potential impact if the app succeeded. They wanted to work on a startup they felt the world needed, Systrom says. No doubt, some of that interest may have been fueled by working at Facebook (now Meta), which had changed consumers’ news consumption behavior, impacting publishers as well as the spread of misinformation.

“It felt like our consumption of information — both factual, balanced, entertaining, etc. — had an existential crisis,” Systrom tells TechCrunch. Plus, he adds, “many of the people producing this content are going out of business.”

Meanwhile, on the consumer side of the news reading experience, there’s so much information swirling around that people don’t know what they can trust or which item to read. People are asking themselves if a link shared by a friend is actually legit and they’re wondering why they’re reading one article over the many others published on the same topic.

“It might be cheesy to say, because I’ve now said it a bunch of times, but I feel like the worst part about social media is that it’s social,” Systrom says. “I think the ‘social’ part of social media — for a long time, in terms of information consumption — has been a hack to filter for information that would be interesting to you. But we now don’t need that hack, because we can learn what’s interesting to you,” he continues. “We can quantify it. We can build profiles. And then we can serve you content that is both high-quality, balanced and interesting to you.”

This realization led to the creation of Artifact, a social news app powered by machine learning.

Image Credits: Artifact personalization and stats

The app in some ways is very much like others that exist today, which have been founded in other countries, including ByteDance’s Toutiao in China, Japan’s SmartNews and News Break, another personalized news reader with Chinese roots. Like its rivals, Artifact learns from user behavior, engagement and other factors in order to personalize which headlines are presented and in which order.

Despite this competitive landscape, Systrom believes U.S. news consumers want an option that’s actually based in their home market.

“They want a domestic player with a team they trust,” Systrom says, speaking to the news aggregation landscape in the U.S.

His comment is a timely one, given how tensions in the U.S. have been growing over China’s grip on the social networking market with TikTok. The short video app, which is often used as a source for news by Gen Z, is now banned on government phones and bipartisan legislation to further police it is in the works.

Clearing out the clickbait

In addition to its locale, Systrom believes Artifact will be able to differentiate itself based on its unique combination of technology and taste — a directive that could also be used to describe Instagram’s founding for that matter.

Unlike Facebook — which became a platform by which any publisher could deliver news, and oftentimes clickbait — Artifact’s news sources are curated up front, the founder explains.

“When I say taste, I mean the top of the funnel in our system — the publishers we choose to distribute,” notes Systrom. “It’s not a free-for-all. We don’t crawl the entire web and just let everything go in.”

Instead, Artifact has selected the top publishers across different categories to fuel the content in the app. Customers can add their own paid subscriptions, as well. At this time, Artifact doesn’t sell those for a revenue share or involve itself in publishers’ ad sales, though one day that could change, depending on how the app chooses to monetize.

For now, however, the focus is on gaining traction with consumers and ensuring the app’s news sources are worth reading.

Screenshot of Artifact app. Image Source: Artifact

“The line, internally…is we want a balanced ideological corpus, subject to integrity and quality,” Systrom says. “And the idea is not that we only choose left-wing, or we only choose right-wing. We drew the line at quality and integrity subject to a bunch of the metrics that a lot of these third-party fact-checking services have. The third-party services basically rate the integrity of different publishers based on their research and based on public events — like how quickly they correct their stories, whether their funding is transparent, all that kind of stuff,” he notes.

“You can claim it’s editorial,” he continues. “But it’s more about making sure that the set that we’re going to distribute and pour into this powerful machine — that can distribute content widely — that we’re being responsible by giving it content that isn’t going to be misinformation.”

Beyond the integrity of reporting, Artifact aims to deliver a news experience that’s more fulfilling.

“If you log on to a lot of these other sources, you get pretty clickbaity-stuff,” Systrom points out. “I’m not trying to throw shade on folks working in this area, but we wouldn’t work on it if we thought that it was solved. We focus a lot in our system on a different objective, which is this idea of value…if we put in the top-quality sources in these categories and we have coverage — whether it’s parenting or mental wellness, or exercise — that we can create a differentiated content set that feels much different than the front page of a major newspaper but also feels very different than a lot of the other aggregators,” he says.

Yet, even as the app personalizes its content selection to the end user, it doesn’t leave them in so-called “filter bubbles,” necessarily, as Facebook did. Instead, when users click on a headline to read a story, they’re shown the entire coverage across sources, allowing them to peruse the story from different vantage points.

Artifact’s recommendation system

Image Credits: Artifact

Systrom credits Toutiao for driving innovation in recommendation systems, noting that Toutiao essentially helped ByteDance give birth to TikTok. The technology developed for its news discovery was brought to its acquisition of Musical.ly, which became the Chinese app Douyin and its international counterpart TikTok.

But Systrom believes some of the machine learning that Artificat is doing is different.

“The machine learning that a lot of what we’re doing is based on was invented in 2017 at Google. It’s called the transformer…without that, GPT 3, 3.5 etc., wouldn’t exist. Without that, you wouldn’t have DALL-E. Without that, you wouldn’t have ChatGPT,” he says. “You’re inventing a core technology that can then be applied in many different ways.”

The app’s algorithms are focused on more than just tracking clicks and engagement. It weighs other factors, too, like dwell time, read time, shares, stories that get shared in DMs (private messages) and more.

“If you let your algorithm focus on clicks, it will end up serving clickbait. If you simply optimize for only what people have clicked on, you end up having tunnel vision,” Systrom explains.

The model additionally involves an algorithm called Epsilon-Greedy.

“That’s a technical term for you taking some small portion of your time — like 10% or 20% — and you explore. You do something different than you would normally do…you go to the outside of the recommendation spectrum rather than the core of it,” Systrom says. “It’s shown many, many times, especially in reinforcement learning, that having this ‘explore’ budget we’ll call it, actually is optimal for users.”

That’s the same reason why TikTok has begun testing tools that let users refresh their feeds. Without the added spice of unexpected content, the video app’s suggestions had grown stale for some users.

But because the news changes every day, Artifact’s use of this Epsilon-Greedy algorithm also has to adapt as users’ own interests in topics grow and wane. For example, someone might be very into reading about the upcoming elections up until Election Day has passed. Or a new story may immediately capture their attention when it comes out of nowhere, as the story about the Chinese spy balloon did.

Artifact’s editorial consideration, if you can call it that, will also come into how the app’s algorithm is programmed, not just its publisher selections.

“Actually, building the algorithm is enormously editorial,” Systrom says. “Because what you choose to train your algorithm on — the objective function, the data you put in, the data you include, the data you don’t include — is all in editorial judgment. The way you weight different objectives.”

“All of the edge a company has is in its ability to wrangle the data in such a way that produces an outcome that’s optimal,” Systrom says.

If anything is Artifact’s secret sauce, it’s that.

Does Artifact have a future?

Whether all this tech and “taste” is enough for Artifact to succeed remains to be seen. The U.S. news aggregation landscape is not like China’s. And here, Artifact will have to fight against the default ways people access news, including through the news apps that come bundled with their smartphones, as well as the large internet portals like Google and Facebook, and some extent, YouTube and TikTok too.

At launch, Artifact added new functionality, including a new feature that allows users to track how they’ve been engaging with the app and its content in a metrics section, which shows a list of publishers and topics they’ve been reading. Over time, Artifact plans to let users adjust which topics they want to see more and less of, or even block publishers.

They’ll also later be able to socialize through comment threads around the stories themselves, in what could be a stealth competitor to Twitter — an app that’s seen a small exodus in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover. (In fact, Artifact just added a feature similar to Twitter’s with its ability to show you articles trending in your network, if you sync your contacts to the service.)

As for Artifact’s future, Systrom says he hopes it will eventually become a place where users can go, first and foremost, to discover content around their interests and be able to discuss them with others.

That said, it’s still immeasurably hard for a new consumer app to gain traction without fueling customer acquisition costs with buckets of money. But one thing the team learned from building Instagram, is that Facebook can be a useful tool for gaining adoption. Many of its first users found the app by way of Instagram photos posted to Facebook.

“It turns out that Artifact is actually very similar,” Systrom says. “People discover articles and they want to share them elsewhere…You can share an article from Artifact and it has our branding and it has our domain and URL. It works fairly well for top-of-mind awareness.”

He’s not all that worried that this would have him wading into Facebook’s territory, which to some represents an unbeatable giant.

“I might be a contrarian here, but I think the window has always been open [for new social experiences]. The question is whether or not people choose to attack it and if the right people choose to attack it. I could have never predicted that Snapchat would have risen during Instagram, which obviously had a stronghold on images and social — there was no way to predict there was an opening there. There’s no way to predict that TikTok would have come about when Snap and Instagram were so big. I think these things are far more random than you think.”

These changes tend to be around fundamental changes in technology, like the interest graph, Systrom says.

But, he adds, “I do think we see this wave of machine learning right now that opens up an enormous window to do new things in social.”

The tech behind Artifact, the newly launched news aggregator from Instagram’s co-founders by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/the-tech-behind-artifact-the-newly-launched-news-aggregator-from-instagrams-co-founders/

It appears that we have yet another SPAC meltdown on our hands. Embark, a maker of autonomous trucking software, has laid off most of its staff, intends to use its remaining employees to wind down its operations, and is working with its board to “to evaluate [its] options, including selling assets, restructuring the company or shutting down completely.”

For a company that closed its blank-check combination back in late 2021, it’s a stunning fall from grace. Crunchbase counts more than $100 million invested into Embark before its SPAC deal, including capital from Sequoia and Tiger Global.

It raised even more capital when merging with Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp. II. And after not that many public earnings reports, it’s seemingly game over.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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Sure, self-driving vehicles wound up being further out than many anticipated. Those surprised by their slow development seem to include every entity that placed bets on that technology being more mature than it is. Embark is hardly the only company in its larger market area to struggle.

Who’s to blame for all the SPAC implosions? by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/whos-to-blame-for-all-the-spac-implosions/

TikTok is launching a new feature called “Series” that allows eligible creators to post content behind a paywall, the company announced on Tuesday. The new monetization feature adds another way for creators to earn money for their content on the app. Series is current only available to select creators, with applications to join opening in the coming months.

Series enables eligible creators to post collections of premium content behind a paywall that viewers can purchase for access. One Series can include up to 80 videos, each up to 20 minutes long. Standard videos on TikTok can currently only be up to 10 minutes long, so the expanded video length for Series gives creators more time and flexibility when filming things like cooking demos, beauty tutorials, educational content, comedy sketches and more. The change marks yet another way that TikTok is inching further into YouTube’s territory.

Creators can select the price for their Series that they believe best reflects the value of their exclusive content. The content can be purchased for access via direct in-video links or through a creator’s profile. A spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch that creators will be able to keep 100% of their earnings after applicable fees for a limited time. TikTok will likely start taking a cut in the future, but didn’t say how much it would be.

It’s worth noting that users won’t be able to use Series as a way to post adult content, as Series content must abide by TikTok’s Community Guidelines.

“From the top collection of must-know spreadsheet shortcuts to the most effective workouts or the latest baked oats recipe, the diverse range of valuable and entertaining content on TikTok has quickly become a part of a billion people’s lives around the world,” the company said in a blog post. “Today we’re introducing Series, a new way for creators to share their stories, talents and creativity as premium content while further deepening their connection with the TikTok community.”

Today’s launch isn’t exactly a surprise, given that The Information reported last month that TikTok was working on a paywall feature. The new feature will allow TikTok to better reward creators, who are the driving factor of the app, as their viral videos have been vital to the app’s growth and popularity. However, the idea of exclusive content for paying users isn’t a new concept, as Instagram lets creators share subscriber-only content.

The new feature comes two weeks after TikTok launched the beta version of a revamped creator fund called the “Creativity Program.” The program is designed to generate higher revenue and unlock more opportunities for creators. The Creativity Program is available to select creators on an invite-only basis, with availability to all eligible creators coming soon.

TikTok said it developed the new program based on feedback from creators on its current earning opportunities, including its Creator Fund. The fund, which rewards creators for popular videos, launched in 2020 with a $1 billion commitment over three years. Its model has been criticized by creators who have complained about low payouts. TikTok is now acknowledging these concerns with the launch of the new program.

The new Series feature and Creativity Program are the latest additions to TikTok’s suite of monetization tools, which includes LIVE subscriptions and TikTok Pulse. The company also has tips and gifts monetization features.

The expansion of TikTok’s current payout offerings for creators comes as its competitors are ramping up their offerings. Last month, YouTube began sharing ad revenue with Shorts creators. No short-form video platform has quite figured out how to share ad revenue up until now, which gives Shorts a notable leg up on the competition.

TikTok’s latest announcements show that it’s looking to appease creators and give them more ways to earn money through its platform amid enhanced competition from other companies.

TikTok’s new ‘Series’ feature lets creators put content behind a paywall by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/tiktoks-new-series-feature-lets-creators-put-content-behind-a-paywall/

When it comes to sustainable infrastructure development, technology is making terrific leaps and bounds. The money to make it happen, however? That leaves a thing or two to be desired. For one thing, the processes remain largely manual, with financing in this sector remaining reliant on emails, spreadsheets, and documents in a variety of formats. Streamlined, and indeed sustainable, it ain’t. With its $25 million Series B funding–which takes its total funding to over $42 million–Banyan Infrastructure is seeking to align sustainable project finance with the technology it is meant to support and develop.

Old-school systems probably didn’t quite do it for old-school oil and gas investments, but they damn sure don’t cut it for newer, greener, more sustainable technologies. These are usually smaller deals–typical commercial and industrial deals are between $1 million and $5 million– where financing comes from more distributed sources, which means that the time required to coordinate them and perform due diligence is sizable. 

For Banyan, these inefficiencies in communication and monitoring are pain points it wants to solve with its purpose-built project finance software. With it, banks, financiers, and developers should be able to automate and track complex project finance transactions with a unified risk and data management system. It estimates that it can save up to 1,000 hours for every loan processed.

Farewell tedious and time-consuming manual systems, good morning digitized loans and workflows in addition to automating data ingestion, risk monitoring, and contractual compliance for each loan. This, Banyan hopes, will enable its customers to rapidly grow their sustainable infrastructure portfolio and help to close the estimated $3.5 trillion dollar per year investment gap in renewable infrastructure that is required in order to meet our net zero targets by 2050.

“Because standardization is lacking for sustainable technology, risk-averse investors are hesitant to move quickly in this relatively new industry,” said Will Greene, Banyan Infrastructure’s co-founder and CEO said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Our software focuses on reducing transaction costs and increasing transparency to create previously unseen speed and scale of project finance,” 

Banyan believes that right now is the moment to push forwards with its software, following the introduction of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in the USA. This injection of $369 billion of government money is aimed at supporting and developing clean energy technology, manufacturing, and innovation. There’s not just more money coming into the sector, but there’s more attention being paid to it, too. Being able to track, monitor, and complete deals with greater efficiency means that these funds can go further, faster. The theory is that it will make investment in sustainable infrastructure a more attractive proposition, too.

“The fresh commitment of $369B from the IRA is fantastic, but we believe we won’t be able to deploy it without technology to multiply human capacity,” Greene said. “We’re looking forward to building out new features to unlock the IRA and other opportunities that our customers need to act on” 

The $25 million funding round was led by Climate software investor Energize Ventures. It was joined by new investors SE Ventures and Elemental Excelerator, and existing investors VoLo Earth and Ulu Ventures. Furthermore, Banyan announced that Juan Muldoon, partner at Energize, has joined its board of directors.

Banyan has two focal points for its new funds: people and product. When it comes to people, Banyan is looking to double its headcount over the next year, with particular emphasis on its product, success, and go-to-market teams. With an eye on international expansion, Banyan is keen to transition from product-led growth to sales-led growth.

“We’re also growing our product to build best practice new regulatory requirements,” says Greene, “including offering a robust product offering that can support our customers in unlocking the benefits of policies like the IRA, as well as support new and emerging technologies, like carbon capture, hydrogen, batteries and more.”.

Greene and his co-founder Amanda Li came together to found Banyan Infrastructure recognizing the skills they each brought ability to better finance infrastructures that can have an impact on climate change.

“Our combined unique backgrounds were exactly what was needed when starting Banyan Infrastructure: with Amanda bringing on-the-ground project finance experience, and myself bringing technical know-how of building enterprise SaaS companies at varying scales,” says Greene. “This company is deeply important to us both as we believe the biggest lever you can pull in changing the trajectory of climate change is investing in renewable infrastructure, and project finance is the underpinning industry and mechanism behind the funnel of investment from financiers to projects.”

For Greene, Banyan is about moving project finance from Web 1.0 to Web 3.0 and speeding up the rate at which capital can be deployed in sustainable industries. It’s about at least meeting, and ideally exceeding, climate goals by using technology to remove funding bottlenecks.

“In ten years, I would love to look back and know that the world has significantly more deployed renewable energy and other sustainable infrastructure projects because of what Banyan has enabled, Greene concluded.” 

Banyan wants to unlock financing for a (more) sustainable future by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/banyan-series-b/

There are plenty of good reasons why you should use a password manager, from helping you generate and store complex and unique passwords to not needing to remember any of them. But for some folks, getting started with a password manager for the first time can be a hassle.

To cater to that problem, a16z-backed company Uno is launching a new password manager with design-centric thinking. The startup’s password manager is an app for iOS and Mac, and a Chrome extension, to make it easier for people to handle passwords and logins.

Uno packs a ton of features that aim to make login easier: one-click login, social password recovery through trusted contacts, customized and easy password sharing, and a secure vault to store private keys, credit card details, and addresses.

The Chrome extension does most of the work for you when you log into sites on your desktop. If you have your login saved with Uno, the company handles all login processes with one click — including 2FA codes sent to emails. You have to sign in to Gmail and give permission to read your latest email to the app, but the company says all this process is handled on your device and no email data is sent to their servers.

The company says the extension can identify when to fill in address fields with data and when to fill in the login information.

Both iOS and Mac apps are in beta and have basic secure storage and password autofill capabilities. The startup said that it’s already working on an Android version, but it didn’t give a specific timeline for the launch.

Image Credits: Uno

If you lose your device, the app asks you to save a private key phrase for recovering your data. There is another — but slightly complicated — process for recovering your data. You can add trusted contacts to your Uno account, and for recovery, they can help you by verifying who you are with votes. But the catch is that all of them have to be Uno users. So unless you find folks who also use the app, you might be better sticking to traditional methods like recovering from another device or entering your private key phrase.

The company

Uno is founded by Parteek Saran, who has a background in design and worked on projects with Lady Gaga, Facebook, and Postmates. Saran also co-created an interaction design and prototyping tool named Form, which was acquired by Google in 2014. Post-acquisition, he worked at the search giant for five years working on products ranging from hardware design to software design — most notably working on Google’s Material Design approach.

The company has raised $3 million in seed funding until now led by Andreeson Horowitz with participation from Lookout founder Kevin Mahaffey, and Dug Song from Duo security.

Uno’s app for iOS. Image Credits: Uno

Saran said that the inspiration for Uno came from when hackers took control of his email, financial services, social accounts, and even Spotify playlists.

“After getting hacked, I was upgrading the security of my accounts, and I realized the process was technical and cumbersome. There were a lot of steps and terminology that could be difficult to understand for non-technical people,” Saran told TechCrunch. “Getting people to use a password manager on a regular basis is a behavioral issue. The way to influence that is to design a solution by looking at how humans interact with this kind of software.”

The founder said that with Uno, he wants to target a broader audience of folks — including users who don’t care much about password security.

The security

While password managers increase convenience by storing a ton of credentials, they also have a responsibility to protect that data and the user’s privacy.

Uno says that it collects minimal data from users and all the data stored on its servers is encrypted with the private key stored locally on users’ devices, which the company cannot access. It notes that only the email, phone number, and public key of the account are collected.

Saran said the app does not track any personal data using analytical tools. The company’s privacy policy notes that “in no event will the private contents of your secure vault ever be transmitted to Uno in a form that Uno can decipher.”

“We really care about people’s privacy and their security. I think people are kind of tired of giving away their data and like doing all these things. So our stance has been — we don’t want that. Our app requires bare minimum permissions to work,” Saran said.

There is also a question of security given that hackers — albeit very skilled ones — got access to LastPass’ data including customers’ password vaults. A starting point for Uno would be to limit what customer data its employees can access. The startup says it wants to avoid these kinds of incidents by keeping a local-first and client-first approach by storing sensitive data on the user’s device and not in its cloud. Also, Uno notes that since it encrypts all customer data including passwords, hackers can’t make sense of it even if they get hold of a person’s device.

As for convincing customers to trust its product, Uno said it has reached out to larger vendors to conduct a formal security audit of its apps.

“Uno has had independent security engineers audit code and conduct penetration testing and have kickstarted the process of reaching out to larger vendors for a formal audit. They’re currently in open beta, which is why this wasn’t kicked off sooner.” Uno said. Uno hasn’t said what the results were from early code audits and penetration testing, but said it plans to publish future findings from its audits.

The company’s target audience — non-technical folks — might not be asking these questions. But Uno has a duty towards its advanced users to provide enough assurance and data by being open and transparent about the password manager’s security practices.

a16z-backed Uno launches a design-centric password manager by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/a16z-backed-uno-launches-a-design-centric-password-manager/

The enterprise is about to get hit by the generative AI hype train, as Salesforce prepares to invest in startups developing what it calls “responsible generative AI.”

The cloud software giant, via its Salesforce Ventures VC off-shoot, today announced a $250 million generative AI investment fund, which it said has already invested in four startupssearch engine upstart You.com, which introduced generative AI smarts a few months back; Anthropic, a heavily VC-backed AI startup from former employees of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT; Cohere, a natural language processing (NLP) startup that recently partnered with Google; and a stealthy startup called Hearth.AI.

In truth, Salesforce has had a busy day at its annual TrailheadDX developer conference, announcing a generative AI pilot they’re calling Einstein GPT,’ which brings ChatGPT-like features to the broader Salesforce platform. This includes a new ChatGPT app for Slack, promising conversation summaries and writing assistance directly inside the enterprise communications app.

ChatGPT, for the uninitiated, is a chatbot-like technology trained on large language models (LLMs) that can generate essays, poems, lyrics, articles, and more from simple natural-language instructions.

Salesforce Ventures has launched a bunch of vertical-specific investment funds through the years, including funds aimed at particular geographies such as Japan or Canada. It has also previously launched a dedicated AI fund, targeting startups building AI smarts on top of Salesforce.

So it perhaps should come as little surprise that Salesforce Ventures is now looking to invest in companies working on what is one of the buzziest tech trends in recent times.

Salesforce Ventures targets new $250M fund at generative AI startups by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/salesforce-ventures-targets-new-250m-fund-at-generative-ai-startups/

Amazon rules the roost when it comes to e-commerce, with its marketplace outpacing everyone else when it comes to Threecolts, a London startup founded by an ex-Amazon exec that builds software for brands and retailers to manage their Amazon sales channel, has picked up some 22,000 customers since it first set up shop in 2021. Now, to feed its growth, it’s announcing that it has raised $90 million in funding.

The $90 million figure covers a Series A that Threecolts closed recently; an earlier, never-before disclosed pre-A investment; and some debt, with investors across those tranches including Crossbeam Venture Partners, General Global Capital, Stratos and CoVenture. Yoda Yee, Threecolts’ founder and CEO, would not disclose how much was invested in each of these areas, citing competitive advantage and the fact that there have been a number of others, like Brex, that are paving the way for being less precise when discussing how much and when financing events have taken place, since it provides too much signal to rivals. He declined to talk about valuation for the same reason.

Threecolts, however, is profitable, and says that revenues have grown 6x year-over-year. It’s used the debt to make acquisitions — 14 in all to date in less than two years, in a roll-up play that echoes those we have seen in other parts of the e-commerce ecosystem (specifically among those aggregating smaller e-commerce retailers that sell on Amazon).

That high number of acquisitions speaks to the bigger fragmentation in e-commerce, but also the consolidation that is taking place right now: a number of interesting ideas, breathed into life as startups by way of easy access to funding, have had a hard time more recently raising more funding. Now as they get to the end of their runway, or find it hard to scale, they are getting snapped up by those able to keep going.

Yee previously worked at Amazon coordinating with third parties selling on its marketplaces, and through that understood a little about what Amazon does provide, what it does not, and what could be done better.

Most importantly, he saw first-hand that Amazon’s position both as a enabler, but also competitor to retailers and brands, complicates its relationship with those third parties. Not only does Amazon sell items that directly compete with those that resellers or private-label retailers are selling on its platform, but ultimately, it will create algorithms that result in maximum conversion for Amazon itself, not that of any individual seller. And as a third-party seller, that could boost you, but it could also bury you.

“Because we are able to focus on tools alone, customers trust us more,” he said. “You just can’t trust Amazon with things like automated repricing. Amazon has its own incentives.”

Repricing is just one example here: the same goes for other functions, and beyond that, how Amazon chooses to use the data that it amasses about how people buy and sell on its platform. It is not the only startup that’s aiming to address this opportunity: the inherent conflict that Yee points out has spurred the rise of a number of companies building tools for third-party sellers, and these compete with Threecolts. They include Helium 10, Jungle Scout (which has raised a lot of money itself) and more.

But with more than 6 million businesses doing business on Amazon, the opportunity is clearly one with room for multiple players, and also approaches. The basic concept has driven Threecolts to develop (and acquire) a set of tools that include not just tools to monitor and adjust pricing, but also real-time listing and inventory alerts, customer service integrations across different channels, API dashboards, third-party data source monitoring, automation for feedback and product review monitoring, analytics around profit and sales, and more.

Some of those tools complement what Amazon has done a solid job in providing: Threecolts doesn’t offer a competitor to Fulfillment by Amazon, but it does have a tool to monitor FBA fees.

Threecolts says that its 22,000 customers collectively generate more than $30 billion in gross merchandise sales and have collectively added $200 million in profits due to Threecolts’ tools, as well as a 200% bump in detail page conversions.

That client list includes big names like Samsung, Panasonic and L’Oréal, but also a long tail of smaller sellers (which are 70% of Threecolts’ revenue) and even some of the roll-up companies that have been acquiring successful brands that sell on Amazon, attempting to create their own economies of scale either in supply chains or something else.

What Threecolts tracks is indicative of macro trends in the e-commerce universe. Yee said that Amazon accounts for the vast proportion, 90%, of where its customers currently sell, but he added that it is seeing some activity in requesting tools to cover other marketplaces like Walmart, eBay, or more localised or vertically focused sites. He also noted that recently there’s been a surge of resellers as customers, versus those selling their own, original “private label” products.

Although there has been an uptick in activity on platforms like Instagram for so-called social selling, this hasn’t made its way into requests for Threecolts to support those platforms. Yee said that the likes of WhatsApp and Instagram do come up in conversations, but it’s more to do with them as customer support channels, he said.

Crossbeam has carved out a niche in investing in e-commerce startups, specifically those that cater to businesses (which can be brands, retailers, or even influencers) that run their businesses online and via marketplaces, so it’s a natural fit as a backer for Threecolts and Sakib Jamal, the senior investment associate who lead on the deal, told TechCrunch the firm was “very excited” by the startup and opportunity.

“Threecolts’ impressive execution over the past year means that sellers can now access a one-stop shop solution for an increasing number of pain points, easing vendor fatigue and administrative loads,” he added in a statement. “Yoda and team have provided returns that are realized in quick feedback loops for customers of all shapes and sizes, from large enterprises to up-and-coming businesses.”

Threecolts raises $90M to build out its toolkit for third parties selling on marketplaces like Amazon by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/threecolts-raises-90m-to-build-out-its-toolkit-for-third-parties-selling-on-marketplaces-like-amazon/