Tom Mueller is a self-described race car guy. Upon retiring from his role as CTO of Propulsion at SpaceX in November 2020, he “mostly wanted to go racing and ride dirt bikes and travel,” he said in a recent interview. Mueller, who is 61, was putting behind him a storied career: While at SpaceX, he led the development of the Merlin rocket engine, which powers the Falcon 9 rocket, and the Draco engines that power the Dragon spacecraft.

Retirement was the plan — but plans don’t always work out as intended.

As soon as he retired, Mueller, who is widely considered one of the leading experts of propulsion alive today, started sketching up a small thruster. That thruster now has a name, “Rigel,” after the blue supergiant in the constellation Orion. It’s become a cornerstone of Mueller’s new startup, Impulse Space, which he founded in September 2021. With the new venture, Mueller wants Impulse to be the go-to option for cost-effective, efficient in-space transportation.

“It was going to be just for fun and not too serious, but then some ex-SpaceX people started talking [to me] and wanted to help and all of the sudden it became real,” he said. “Now it’s full on.”

To Mars

“Full on” might be an understatement. Impulse has raised a notable amount of money for such a young space startup, including a $20 million seed round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and a subsequent $10 million investment from VC firm Lux Capital. Given Mueller’s resume, he didn’t have to search very hard — or at all — for people willing to put their cash behind his ideas.

“Somebody asked me, ‘How long after you incorporated Impulse did it take for investors to want to give you money? And I said, ‘Well actually, I incorporated Impulse because I had investors tell me they wanted to fund me,” Mueller said.

Nor has Impulse had too much trouble finding talent. The startup has now grown to around 40 people, with many on the technical leadership team, such as Kevin Miller, VP of Propulsion, George Ketigian, VP of Integration, and Paul Seebacher, VP of Manufacturing, with prior experience at SpaceX. Impulse’s COO, Barry Matsumori, also had a nearly four-year stint at SpaceX as the SVP of Sales and Business Development.

Impulse made the ambitious announcement earlier this month that it would be attempting a Mars mission with Relativity Space. The two companies, neither of which have yet to send their respective technologies to orbit, want to launch as soon as 2024. It was Relativity’s idea, Mueller said. He recounted how Zach Dunn, Relativity’s SVP of Engineering and Manufacturing and former SpaceX-er, approached Mueller about the mission. (Mueller and Dunn go way back, with Mueller hiring him for an internship at SpaceX.)

The Fashion Kingdom (TFK), an Egyptian e-commerce marketplace for fashion, beauty and home accessories items, announced today that it has raised $2.6 million in seed funding led by CVentures, a corporate venture capital firm based in Egypt. A15, an early-stage VC in the MENA region that has backed the likes of Esaal, Paymob and Helios Investment Partners subsidiary, TPay, made a follow-on investment, according to TFK.

Fadi Antaki, co-founder and CEO of TFK, founded the company in January 2020 with Marianne Simaika and Karim Abd El Kader. They launched the e-commerce platform six months later. Antaki is also a general partner at A15. Antaki noticed a need for a platform that sold fashion products with fast deliveries, different payment methods, and a recommendation feature in Egypt. This opportunity made the chief executive tap into the knowledge he acquired as a kid born into a family with a long history in the apparel business to launch TFK.

“We established the company pre-COVID. And at the time, we saw a big gap or maybe a lack of focus on a place dedicated to selling fashion products, recommendations for what to wear, quick deliveries, and different payment methods. There wasn’t anyone focused on this, especially in fashion,” said Antaki.

TFK deals with a range of products–shoes, beauty products, personal care, accessories, home fashion, etc.–that cater to different demographics. The platform helps local and international brands grow their sales online through their curated marketplace that provides an omnichannel experience to customers: a place where shoppers can find all their fashion needs and exchange products when needed.

There are over 200 brands on the TFK platform, growing 10-15% month-over-month. It has more than 150,000 customers; every month, about 40% of its sales come from returning customers.

Not only does the platform enlist products of all these brands for customers’ viewing and buying pleasure, but it also provides ancillary services to them. TFK provides a virtual fitting room that helps brands get accustomed to their customers’ sizes and recommend outfits to customers for different occasions. Also, its “360-degree value proposition” for brands involves offering a one-stop-shop solution covering operations, co-marketing, and digital content creation services.

“Earlier this year, we found that one of the most important areas we thought we needed to focus on was the brand. There are good quality and price brands that don’t have the know-how to sell online. They need a lot of support in operation, fulfillment, warehousing, and digital production and photography,” the CEO said. “So besides selling their products, we help them with the different aspects that would then be able to sell well online, whether supporting the operation or the marketing side. And for us, it’s not just about reselling their products but also going in as their digital partners.”

The fashion e-commerce platform makes revenue via the traditional model where it counts a mark-up to products and a consignment model where it takes a commission. Supporting revenue streams come from additional services it provides to the brands, such as …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/the-fashion-kingdom-an-egyptian-fashion-e-commerce-startup-raises-2-6m-in-seed-funding/

Holey Grail Donuts started selling its hand-fried, made-to-order taro donuts on Sunday mornings out of a little red burger trailer in Kauai in 2018.

Four years and hundreds of long lines later, the truck is still there, but the company is taking on what co-founder Nile Dreiling calls “a stale $40 billion donut industry” by expanding its presence into brick-and-mortar locations in Los Angeles after raising $9 million in financing.

Dreiling, who was previously doing ecological engineering in Oregon, teamed up with his sister, Hana Dreiling, a private chef in Kauai, Hawaii, to start Holey Grail Donuts. They spent a lot of time reverse-engineering the donut to get the end product, which is a taro donut fried in organic, fair trade coconut oil versus palm and other oils “that often leave a waxy taste in your mouth,” Nile Dreiling told TechCrunch. He believes his company is the only one making its donuts in this sustainable way.

“We are taking something that everyone is familiar with, and reinventing it to meet our values, while essentially improving the tastes without the negative health and environmental consequences,” he said. “The process we incorporate yields a donut base that’s hot and crispy and not too sweet, which is the perfect vessel for essentially consistently rotating the garnishes. We currently have over 60 flavors that we’ve developed over the past couple of years.”

The fun part? The company uses a donut robot to make and fry the dough so one person isn’t constantly sitting in front of the fryer. That’s particularly helpful inside the food truck where there is limited space, and enables employees to serve a large capacity of customers quicker, Nile Dreiling said. Holey Grail Donuts also utilizes an app so people can order ahead of time.

Among the ever-rotating jukebox of flavors, popular toppings include L&L (lemon zest infused sugar, lime curd, finger lime caviar and begonia petals), North Shore (locally-grown turmeric, tangelo and freshly cracked black pepper) and Lydgate Farms (vanilla bean, single-origin cacao nibs and cherry).

As mentioned, the global donut industry is a $40 billion market, and Dreiling estimates the market is approaching $50 billion by 2025, with 30% of that growth attributed to North America’s love of the donut.

With that, changes are happening even at the highest levels in the industry with well-known brands like Dunkin’ and Krispy Kreme pivoting to supply and advertise new product ranges that meet the demands of people wanting to make healthier choices, he explained.

“What we’re doing at Holey Grail is approaching demand with a high level of integrity and a mission focused on creating healthier options with incredible taste,” Nile Dreiling added.

The company currently operates a food truck in Waikiki and recently opened a flagship store in Honolulu to complement a shop in Hanalei.

Nile Dreiling said he was not sharing specific details related to revenue or growth metrics at this time, but did say, “we have certainly …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/holey-grail-donuts-9m-los-angeles-retail-expansion/

The crypto hardware wallet industry, somewhat eclipsed as crypto exchanges gained in popularity, may be due for a gradual come-back. As some centralized crypto exchanges experienced difficulties in operations while crypto currencies plummeted in value and users clamoured to withdraw funds, this rise in instability may have boosted interest in the ‘cold wallet’ industry. According to a report, the global hardware wallet market reportedly reached a value of $252 million in 2021 and is expected to reach a value of $1.1 billion by 2027, or a CAGR of 27.2%. This would suggest it may outpace the reported 12.7% growth rate of crypto exchanges, with a predicted market revenue value of $675 million by 2028. Read into that what you will.

Suffice it to say that into this bear market is launching SF-based Hito, which is marketing itself as an ‘iPod for crypto’, Hito is size of a credit card, has a large multi-touch screen, and connects to devices wirelessly.

Hito may be pushing at an increasingly open door. Given two of the primary hardware wallets, Ledger and Trezor, have roughly 5 million users, there would appear to be plenty of room for growth, since that there are at least 295 million crypto holders who may decide to add hardware wallets to their portfolio.

Hito is priced at $149. This contrasts with – for example – the cheaper Ledger NANO S which comes in at around $65. Hito’s pitch for that extra cost is that transfers can be maid wirelessly using either Bluetooth or NFC, while updates and charging are also wireless. So I guess you are paying to remove the USB connector?

There are other features, however. These include a 2-inch multi-touch color screen which displays your crypto assets; support for over 600 digital assets, including Bitcoin, ETH, and ERC20 tokens; connections to other wallets such as WalletConnect, MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Argent, Gnosis Safe Multisig; a single System-on-a-Chip; support for multiple wallets and pin codes; and shielding from electromagnetic signal readers. 

If Hito is as simple to use as it claims to be, it may have a chance in the market, given current conditions. And it’s fair to say many hardware wallets require a lot more technical technical skills than the average person can muster, so any simplification is to be welcomed.

I asked founder Mike Kirillov, CEO and Founder of Hito why he thinks Hito has a shot in this current environment: “Previous hardware crypto wallets have been built for geeks and by geeks. They’re cumbersome, require technical skills, hard to interact with and always cause a feeling you’re about to do something wrong. Ultimately, they weren’t able to become a mainstream solution, meaning the funds of most crypto holders out there aren’t safe,” he said.

Kirillov claims his team spent three years building Hito in stealth mode as “a ubiquitous, easy-to-use device with great UX. It is stylish, intuitive, and ultimately protected hardware wallet that can that the mass audience can rely upon,” he claims.

Certainly the more mainstream Crypto …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/as-crypto-exchanges-struggle-in-a-bear-market-are-hardware-wallets-about-to-make-a-come-back/

Traumatized by an endless night of hellish flights, one writer found herself unable to enter airports again. To steel herself for future travel, she tested a digital headset alleged to soothe one’s brain. …read more

https://www.wsj.com/articles/headphones-for-travel-anxiety-11658347478?mod=rss_Technology

Best Buy is opening a new digital-first 5,000 square feet small store in Monroe, North Carolina on July 26. This store will have selected tech products like home theater and audio, computing, headphones, wearables, fitness, cell phones, cameras, smart home, and small appliances that shoppers can experience and purchase.

This is a departure from the company’s big box stores that are typical of 35,000-40,000 square feet in size. The company says while shoppers won’t be able to buy major appliances from this store, they can still place an order on the site, and pick them up from the Monroe store. What’s more, for regular-sized items, the company is placing pick-up lockers outside the store, so shoppers can grab online orders anytime.

Blue shirt employees and Geek Squad techs will staff the store for purchasing advice. Plus, shoppers can virtually contact experts through from its virtual store through voice calls, video calls, or chat.

Demos are a critical part of this format, and the firm said shoppers can try most of the products before buying them. Like Apple Stores, shoppers can purchase items from the show floor. Just scan a QR code next to the item, and Best Buy staff will bring the item from the backroom. Or if it’s a small item, like a charging cable, scan the QR code using the Best Buy app, and grab the item from the shelf.

Best Buy said last year it wanted to experiment with new store formats and this digital-first small store is a part of that project. The firm has experimented with small-format stores in the past with its mobile stores, but it closed them down in 2018. These stores, mainly located in shopping malls, were even smaller in size with an average footprint of less than 2,000 square feet.

Amazon has also been experimenting with brick-and-mortar stores by opening its first clothing store in May in Los Angeles. The company also introduced a new shopping cart earlier this month that allows customers to skip the checkout line.

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/best-buy-is-testing-a-digital-first-smaller-retail-store/

CircleCI, the popular continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform, today announced a partnership with GitLab, the popular DevOps platform that also offers an integrated CI/CD service. That may seem like a bit of an odd match-up at first, but CircleCI argues that by providing support for GitLab SaaS customers, it can help those users manage software changes anywhere in the software ecosystem.

Specifically, this means developers can now trigger pipelines in CircleCI from GitLab forked merge requests, for example, and CircleCI will be able to provide performance and health metrics to its customers on GitLab SaaS, all while also benefitting from CircleCI’s permission models and existing toolchains.

“When we launched 11 years ago, the only flow that people really cared about was: a developer makes a change in code, they commit, they push. That was all that existed,” CircleCI CEO Jim Rose said. “And over the last 11 years, it’s just metastasized into all these other things.”

He acknowledged that for some users, simply using something like GitLab’s own end-to-end solution will work just fine for them. “That’s great for them,” he said. “I think in most situations, what we have found is that due to the complexity of the number of [version control systems] and due to the complexity of the number of deploy targets — most people we talk to are multi-cloud — you end up with a bit of a mishmash in the middle. And so we find our sweet spot is if you’re running multiple [version control systems] and multiple sources of change and you’re running multi-cloud, you may not benefit from attaching your build system to only one of those endpoints and then trying to stretch it out. Instead, what we try to do is go in as an agnostic broker and that allows you to make some of these different decisions individually.”

For CircleCI, it’s this focus on being the one service to manage code changes, something that becomes even more important as we’re moving to a world where an increasingly large part of a company’s infrastructure is managed by ‘[x] as code’ services, that allows it to occupy this neutral position where it can both partner and compete with the likes of GitLab, GitHub and Atlassian.

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/circleci-partners-with-gitlab/

Guava, a banking and networking platform targeting Black entrepreneurs, announced today the closing of a $2.4 million seed round led by Heron Rock.

Founded last year by Kelly Ifill, the company aims to narrow the racial wealth gap by providing financial services to Black small businesses and creators. The digital banking platform — set to launch early next year officially — allows entrepreneurs to check expenses, budget, transfer money, track growth, and connect with other entrepreneurs looking to scale their businesses.

Ifill said fostering a safe community for Black founders is a personal passion, noting that small businesses are the “backbone” of the U.S. economy. She said entrepreneurship could be an economic and social equalizer if Black people received more opportunities to participate equitably.

Indeed, the Harvard Business Review reported last year that Black women are more likely to start businesses than white men. At the same time, Bloomberg reported that Black founders — Black women specifically — were the fastest growing cohort of entrepreneurs. And yet, Black founders receive less than 2% of all venture capital funding, and only 3% of Black women run mature businesses. During the pandemic, more than 40% of Black businesses shuttered, compared with 17% of white-owned businesses; furthermore, the cohort was disproportionately unable to secure Paycheck Protection Program loans to keep their businesses afloat.

“Black folks had to be entrepreneurs, we had to build businesses to support our families, but because of racism, we were excluded from so many opportunities,” Ifill told TechCrunch. “Guava aims to tackle the racial wealth gap head-on by facilitating the growth and resilience of Black small-business owners, creators, and entrepreneurs.”

Ifill plans to use the money to expand her team of eight and build more credit products to provide access to capital for entrepreneurs in rural areas. Also known as banking deserts, these areas lack access to financial institutions, disproportionately impacting the Black community. As a result, Ifill hopes Guava will help Black entrepreneurs receive access to the financial support needed to weather every kind of financial storm, especially as another recession looms.

“Not only have legacy banks underserved Black communities for decades, but they also failed to recognize the vast financial opportunities they missed by doing so,” Ifill said. “Digital banks like Guava can help by providing broader access to core services, networks, and liquidity.”

Ifill started fundraising in March and said finding investors aligned with her company’s vision was paramount. One of those funders happened to be Tom Williams, the general partner of Heron Rock, whom she met via a mutual friend.

“[Kelly] is an incredible founder and the right person to lead in creating not just a set of financial products but, just as importantly, a community in which Black business owners can learn and grow together,” Williams told TechCrunch.

Lexi Reese, …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/fintech-guava-raises-2-4m-to-provide-banking-services-to-black-small-business-owners/

Autonomous trucking startup Kodiak Robotics recently completed a coast-to-coast commercial run between Texas, California and Florida for 10 Roads Express, a USPS mail carrier, according to Kodiak. The pilot marks the first time Kodiak has run an autonomous freight service to Florida.

The freight run included four commercial deliveries on a 5,600 mile round-trip that started in San Antonio and went to San Francisco and then Jacksonville before going back to San Antonio. In total, the trip took 114 hours.

While it’s illegal to test or deploy heavy-duty autonomous commercial trucks in California, Dan Goff, Kodiak’s head of external affairs, says Kodiak operates at a Level 2 system, or an advanced driver assistance system, when it’s in California.

The California DMV, which issues permits for testing and deployment of autonomous light-duty vehicles, could not be reached in time for comment.

The partnership with 10 Roads shows the feasibility of Kodiak’s proprietary lightweight mapping system that doesn’t rely on HD maps, which Kodiak co-founder and CEO Don Burnette says go stale quickly. To bring this route online, Kodiak sent one of its trucks out on a single manual run to collect data on the new territory, data that was then used to automatically create a map. Kodiak didn’t do any autonomy testing on the new lanes before its commercial engagement, which, Burnette says, proves Kodiak can move quickly into new lanes.

“This is really a demonstration of our ability to stand up lanes very quickly and showcase our technology on a broad scale in a commercial setting,” Burnette told TechCrunch. “We want to continue to demonstrate the capabilities of our system in places where we didn’t train it. Everybody likes to claim that their autonomy system generalizes, but it’s different to actually show that it works, and we were able to run our autonomy system throughout this entire loop.”

This was run was a single event, and Kodiak doesn’t yet have the capacity to run a route of the same scale on a daily basis. However, as part of an ongoing commercial partnership, the two companies will continue to work together to evaluate the potential of integrating Kodiak’s tech into 10 Roads’s fleet in the coming years, said Burnette.

Earlier this year, Kodiak also partnered with global supply chain and logistics provider Ceva Logistics to deliver freight autonomously between Dallas, Austin and Oklahoma City. The next month, Kodiak completed a pilot with US Xpress, an American truckload carrier, to test an autonomous freight service between Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta.

Unlike other AV …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/kodiak-robotics-pilots-autonomous-trucking-between-california-texas-and-florida/