The last few years have been a major accelerator for the robotics industry at large, but warehouse robotics may be the biggest winner of all. Stay at home orders fueled adoption in the early days of the pandemic, as some retailers stayed open after being labeled “essential businesses.” Even after things began reopening, those roles have remained difficult to fill, leading many firms to look toward robotic help.

All the while, Amazon has had a jump on most of the industry, dating back to the company’s acquisition of Kiva Systems a decade ago. The competition continues looking for angles to compete with the 800-pound e-commerce gorilla, and robotics startups have flooded the field, promising an edge.

Massachussets-based Locus Robotics has risen in the ranks, becoming one of the most prominent names in what is now a fairly crowded category. “We look at Amazon probably as the best marketing arm in the robotics business today,” Locus Robotics CEO Rick Faulk said at our robotics event in July. “They have set SLAs that everyone has to match. And we look at them as being a great part of our marketing team.”

Locus this week announced a $117 million Series F, led by Goldman Sachs, G2 Venture Partners and Stack, with existing investor Scale Venture Partners also participating. The company has been on a fundraising tear, with a $50 million raise last September that followed a $150 million Series E in February. Locus’s total funding is now north of $400 million. This latest round values Locus at “close to” $2 billion.

The firm’s promise is a brownfield solution, with systems that can be easily integrated into existing warehouses without much fuss. The company marked its one-billionth pick in September of this year and says it’s currently averaging around three million picks a day throughout its global operations.

“Locus is clearly the winner in the flexible warehouse robotics space, and the consistency with which the Locus team executes has been extraordinary,” G2’s Zach Barasz says in a release. “We are thrilled to be investors in Locus Robotics and to partner with the leading warehouse execution company in making global supply chains faster, more cost-effective, and more resilient and sustainable.”

He, along with Goldman Sach’s Mark Midle, will be joining the Locus board.

Asked about the challenges of raising in the current climate, CEO Rick Faulk tells TechCrunch:

In today’s environment, investors are focused on high-quality companies that have both strong growth/market leadership and business unit economics. Therefore, it is important to have a track record and forecast that supports both. Late-stage private companies are competing with beaten down public companies for investment dollars.

Companies are focused on improving operational efficiency and Locus assists with exactly that….therefore, there is strong excitement around being a differentiated solution in a very large end market. The raise will enable Locus to continue to extend its leadership in the market.

Locus raises another $117M for its warehouse robots by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/locus-raises-another-107m-for-its-warehouse-robots/

Unrest in China has affected production of Apple’s devices, threatening the near-term sales mix that investors were counting on to help prop up iPhone revenue and highlighting long-term risks.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-has-no-easy-road-out-of-china-11669661578?mod=rss_Technology

I don’t owe no one ish.

No More.

If your favorite music festival’s lineup didn’t live up to your expectations this year, don’t worry; a new app called Instafest will create a music festival poster for you based on your Spotify listening habits.

The free web app, created by developer Anshay Saboo, is pretty straightforward to use: sign in with your Spotify account, and it will generate a poster based on the artists to whom you most listened. You can customize the poster based on time intervals — last four weeks, last six months, and all time.

You can also select different styles of posters such as Malibu Sunrise, LA Twilight, and Mojave Dusk. Instafest app also calculates what it calls “Basic Score,” that might give you bragging rights about the niche music choice. The lower the score, the more niche your music festival is.

Once you generate the poster, you can choose to rename your music festival, hide/show your username, and hide/show your Basic Score. If you want to remove support for this app, you can follow this guide to revoke access.

Saboo told TechCrunch that he got the idea of the app while thinking about what Coechella’s lineup would look like if he picked the artists.

“I had the idea when I was in bed scrolling through TikTok one day, I saw people were posting videos from Coachella and I started thinking about how I would set the Coachella lineup if I could pick the artists. The thought process led to me thinking about generating a music festival graphic using a Spotify integration, and I built off from there,” he said

The developer is already working on adding support for more platforms. The site already lets you generate a festival poster using your Last.fm listening history and support for Apple Music support is in the works. Saboo wants to add support for music streaming services such as YouTube Music, Deezer, and Amazon Music down the road, he said, but cautioned that it may take some time as not every platform’s APIs are as friendly as those of Spotify.

Saboo is currently focusing on maintaining the app and adding more integration that makes sharing users’ festival lineups more fun. He said while it’s too early to comment on long-term plans, he is exploring possibilities of making a music-based social network around festival graphics generation.

Within hours of launch, Instafest has become a popular talking point on social media. Folks are posting their lineup to show off their good (or trash) taste in music. Saboo told TechCrunch that more than 5 million people have generated their Instafest poster.

The Instafest app seems like a mirror version of the Lineupsupply app, which lets you create playlists through music festival posters. So, if you like someone’s Instafest poster, you can use the LineupSupply app to make a playlist.

The app’s launch comes days before Spotify releases its Wrapped for users — showing customized listening habits across music and podcasts for each user — drops. So in a way, this feels like a Spotify Wrapped before Spotify Wrapped.

Instafest app lets you create your own festival lineup from Spotify by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/instafest-app-lets-you-create-your-own-festival-lineup-from-spotify/

The venture market is in the middle of a downturn, but there are still plenty of emerging fund managers. Seedstars International Ventures, the investment firm that backs high-growth startups around the world, announced today it has launched a platform called Seedstars Capital with Swiss-based investment holding company xMultiplied to help new fund managers around the world launch funds and develop their investment firms.

Seedstars Group co-founder and Seedstars Capital managing partner Michael Weber and Seedstars Capital partner Benjamin Langer told TechCrunch in an email that “Seedstars’ mission is to impact people’s lives in emerging markets through technology and entrepreneurship.” Over the past decade, it has supported various stakeholders, mostly tech entrepreneurs, through entrepreneurial programs.

“We’ve seen so many talented entrepreneurs grow their companies very fast, to the standard of the U.S. or Europe, but unfortunately too many struggle to raise capital to grow even faster. To continue our mission to support them, Seedstars is now supporting the next generation of VC fund managers in emerging markets that will then back those promising entrepreneurs.”

Seedstars Capital will look for sector and industry-specific strategies in regions and countries like Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia and India. It is looking for funds that target pre-seed to Series A companies, since that is where they see the biggest funding gaps and potential.

“Ideally, we want to support gender-diverse teams as we know we need a more inclusive industry,” said Weber and Langer. “We are convinced this will have a tremendous impact at the portfolio level and we will be able to empower more women entrepreneurs.”

The platform will incubate, accelerate and invest in new venture capital funds in emerging markets like Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Managers have usually raised a micro fund, already have experience as angel investors or worked at larger investment firms, and are in the process of launching their first institutional funds of between $15 million to $50 million.

Many fund managers are ones that Seedstars has known for a long time “and despite having relatively little track record on their own we knew they had the necessary skills to become top performing managers,” Weber and Langer said.

In fact, this is how Seedstars International Ventures began. Weber and Langer had worked with co-founder Charlie Graham-Brown since 2014, and in 2019, launched its first global fund for emerging markets, focusing on pre-seed stage. Last year, it launched Fund II with Patricia Sosrodjojo, which is now backed by the IFC, the Rockefeller Foundation, Visa Foundation and Symbiotics, among other investors.

Seedstars Africa Ventures, which invests across the continent, was also formed in a similar way. Seedstars had known Tamim El Zein and Maxime Bouan since they worked at Blue Orchard, focusing on Africa. They hired a third partner, Bruce Nsereko-Lule, and now the fund has LBO France as an anchor investor.

“Over the last year, we have meet with many exceptionally talented teams working very hard building their ecosystems and investing in outstanding entrepreneurs across emerging markets,” Weber and Langer said. “We want to partner with them and allow them to develop their strategies and have a powerful and positive impact.”

Seedstars Capital is committed to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and plans to use ESG and impact considerations as it selects a diverse group of fund managers. It also plans to serve as an investment catalyst with the goal of getting fund managers over $500 million of new funding in total. Seedstars Capital says this will create more than 10,000 new jobs and generate over $20 billion of additional GDP in emerging markets over the next 10 years.

Challenges Seedstars Capital will help emerging VC managers solve include ones like access to international funding. Since most of them typically have assets under management below $50 million and focus on a specific country or sector, they often rely on local individual investors, family offices and development finance institutions (DFIs), which can make fundraising periods stretch as long as 18 to 24 months.

Many emerging managers also lack access to infrastructure, even though they are good at investing in high-growth startups. That means they don’t have the resources to build the right support infrastructure for their portfolio companies and firms, including marketing budgets, tech stacks to manage deal flow and investors, tools and framework to measure the positive impact of portfolio companies or a network of mentors to support their founders.

They also lack access to a community of people, including mentors, investors and other managers, that can help them share best practices, deal flow, market trends or informal events, Weber and Lager said. “These are critical components of building a brand that will allow managers to select the best opportunities and attract the best talent.”

Weber and Langer said Seedstars can help solve these issues because it has over 10 years of experience in emerging markets, and has accelerated or incubated more than 2,000 ventures. It also has a network of more than 1,000 experts and mentors and is therefore “in a prime position to become that partner who can support emerging managers thrive in the industry and develop their investment firms in an institutional manner.”

In terms of investment, Weber and Langer said Seedstars Capital has tested several models, including investing in the management company, providing warehousing facilities or serving as an LP.

In the future, it will work with managers throughout the fundraising stage, providing access to Seedstars network and relationships to help funds hit their first or final close more quickly. It will also be an LP in all funds, and plans to invest between 3% to 5% of the fund size, with the goal of increasing that allocation to up to 10% in the future.

“Having said that, we do not intend to become an investor and our goal will always remain the same, working alongside the most talented emerging managers as partners in the development of their investment firms,” Weber and Langer said.

Seedstars Capital launches to support new fund managers around the world by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/seedstars-capital/

At its re:Invent kickoff keynote tonight, AWS announced a small but important update to Lambda, its serverless platform, that tackles one of the most common issues with the service. Typically, when a function isn’t used for quite a while, Lambda will shut the virtual machine down — and despite improvements like faster Firecracker microVMs, this still takes a while. Now, with SnapStart, AWS is addressing this by creating snapshots of a customer’s Lambda functions and then simply starting those up without having to go through the usual initialization process.

Cold start times have long been one of the biggest complaints about Lambda — yet as Peter DeSantis, AWS’s senior VP of Utility Computing noted in today’s keynote, spiky workloads are pretty much what Lambda (and all other serverless platforms) were built for. With its Firecracker microVMs, AWS already improved cold start times from multiple seconds to well under a second. Now, the company promises a 90% improvement in cold start times by using Firecracker’s Snapshotting feature.

This new feature is now available to all Lambda users, though it has to be enabled for existing Lambda functions and for now, it only works for Java functions that make use of the Corretto runtime.

Once enabled, when you first run that function, it will perform a standard initialization. After that, it will create an encrypted snapshot of the memory and disk state and cache that for reuse. Then, when the function is invoked again, Lambda will grab the cache and start up the function. Cached snapshots are removed after 14 days of inactivity.

As DeSantis also noted, improvements like this will enable more users to bring their workloads to a platform like Lambda. The company already saw this with the launch of Firecracker on Lambda, he explained.

AWS makes Lambda cold start latency a thing of the past with SnapStart by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/aws-makes-lambda-cold-start-latency-a-thing-of-the-past-with-snapstart/

Twitter saw a surge in downloads in China as protests against the country’s stringent COVID restrictions erupted nationwide over the last few days.

The social media app ranked 9th amongst all the free iOS apps in China on November 29, up from 150th a week ago, according to according to Apple Censorship, an independent project that tracks censorship in the App Store.

Gauging the size of Android downloads is trickier because Google Play is unavailable in China. Android-based app stores are operated by an array of local tech firms like Huawei and Xiaomi, which tend to strictly follow local censorship rules. Apple has also in recent years come under fire for bowing to censorship requests from some governments.

Even when China-based users manage to jump over the “Great Firewall” and get on Twitter, they will likely have a difficult time finding the information they need. Bot accounts are bombarding searches for Chinese cities with tweets of porn, escort ads, and gambling links, making it impossible to look up city-related protest news. It doesn’t help that Elon Musk recently axed the team at Twitter responsible for fighting propaganda and misinformation.

Given the increase in Chinese-language bot activity, which is thought to be state-directed, it’s hard to know how many of the new app installs belong to protestors.

Access to Twitter and other Western internet platforms is increasingly challenging in China as Beijing continues to clamp down on censorship circumvention tools. All VPN providers without government authorization are in effect illegal. In October, a protocol widely used in VPN services experienced an unprecedented blockade in the country. It won’t be a surprise if the authorities move to further tighten the grip on VPN tools following this wave of protests.

Despite ban, Twitter downloads surge in China amid COVID protests by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/despite-ban-twitter-downloads-surge-in-china-amid-covid-protests/