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Across the street from Suzhou North, a high-speed railway station in a historic city near Shanghai, a futuristic M-shaped building easily catches the eye of anyone passing by. It houses the headquarters of the five-year-old Chinese autonomous driving startup, Momenta.

Like other major Chinese cities, Suzhou, which is famous for its serene canals and classical gardens, offers subsidized offices and policy support to attract high-tech firms. It seems to have chosen well. Momenta exceeded $1 billion in valuation in two years and became one of the most-funded driving companies in China. The startup has a dazzling list of investors, from Kai-Fu Lee’s Sinovation Ventures, the government of Suzhou, to Mercedes-Benz maker Daimler.

Momenta recently closed another massive round, which nears $500 million and lifts its total funding to over $700 million. The investment marks an important step towards the firm’s international expansion, its chief of business development Sun Huan told TechCrunch. In a few months’ time, Sun will head to Stuttgart, the German hometown of Mercedes-Benz, and open Momenta’s first European office.

The new funding, a Series C round, was led by Chinese state-backed automaker SAIC Motor, Toyota and Bosch, an indication of the traditional auto monoliths’ conviction to smart driving.

“The auto industry needs to develop more advantages when confronting Tesla’s marketing today, so they are paying more attention to autonomous driving,” Momenta’s founder and CEO Cao Xudong told TechCrunch.

Financial investors leading the round were the Singaporean sovereign fund Temasek and Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s Yunfeng Capital. Other participants included Mercedes-Benz AG, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun’s Shunwei Capital, Tencent, Cathay Capital and a few undisclosed institutions. It’s rare to see Tencent and Alibaba (or their affiliates) co-invest.

Be pragmatic

Despite the sizable financial injection, Cao said that “autonomous driving companies can no longer rely solely on fundraising to burn cash.”

Mega-fundraising has become common in the capital-intensive autonomous vehicle world. Momenta’s Chinese rivals Pony.ai has amassed over $1 billion within five years and four-year-old WeRide.ai has raised over $500 million. Like Momenta, the two firms have nabbed investments from big automakers. Pony.ai also counts Toyota as an investor, and WeRide is backed by Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi.

Momenta declined to disclose its latest valuation. For reference, Pony.ai hit $5.3 billion in its November fundraising round.

TechCrunch went on a test ride with Momenta / TechCrunch

Momenta prides itself on what it calls a “two-legged” business model. Unlike some peers that concentrate resources on ‘Level 4,’ or real driverless passenger cars, Momenta is selling semi-automated driving software to carmakers while investing in more advanced tech that is years from mass adoption.

It also tries to cap expenses by crowdsourcing data from auto partners instead of building its own car fleets, which helps save billions of dollars, the company has reiterated. By accumulating driving data at scale, Momenta gets to finetune its algorithms through a self-correcting system. The more data it has, the better its machine becomes at driving.

“It works like a flywheel,” Cao said, using a tech industry jargon first popularized by Jeff Bezos to explain Amazon’s growth.

Driver’s habit

During a test ride TechCrunch went on, where a safety driver was present but did not intervene, a Momenta-powered Lincoln maneuvered through a neighborhood of Suzhou dotted by jaywalkers, unleashed dogs, speeding scooters and reckless truck drivers. When the sedan slowed down at a highway entrance ramp, other cars zipped past us. It felt as if we were going too slowly, but in fact all the human-steered cars were going well above the 40km/h speed limit.

“Some drivers may want the autonomous driving car to be more aggressive, so we are also exploring a system that learns from individual style,” said Jiang Yunfei, an R&D engineer at Momenta who went on the ride. “Of course, on the condition that the car is obeying traffic rules.”

A tablet next to the dashboard showed what our car was capable of seeing and predicting on the road with a set of mass-produced sensors. “Prediction relies on data,” noted Sun. “If we build our own car fleets, it will be very costly to keep the data-driven approach.”

Momenta has joined in the ranks of companies piloting robotaxis on China’s urban roads. It aims to remove some safety drivers from its robotaxis, which it jointly operates with auto partners, in 2022 and expects all of its vehicles to go driverless in 2024. By then, the company will have significantly reduced labor costs and reach a positive operating margin per vehicle.

Automate globally

Momenta has kept a quiet public profile since its inception and rarely talked about its customers except for its partnership with Toyota on high-definition maps, which predated the investment. What Cao could say was the company has fostered “deep collaborations” with carmakers and Tier-1 suppliers across China, Germany and Japan.

By the end of 2021, multiple customers will start mass-producing mid-to-high-end cars equipped with Momenta’s software. And by 2024 or 2025, Momenta’s solutions could be powering millions of vehicles, which should provide a steady stream of driving data to the startup.

“Electrification is no longer enough to differentiate one high-end car brand from another because the motors and batteries they used are quite similar. The key differentiator now is intelligence,” said the founder.

When asked whether Momenta worries about challenges faced by Chinese firms amid geopolitical tensions and continuing U.S.-China technological decoupling, Jijay Shen, who recently joined Momenta as vice president of sales and marketing, said such situations are “uncontrollable” and “regulatory compliance” is the priority for entering any new market.

“The human race was able to achieve significant technological progress in the last ten years exactly because tech companies from different countries are building on top of each other,” said Shen, who spent over a decade at Huawei and was formerly CEO of the telecoms giant’s Ireland business.

“But because of geopolitical factors, many markets will begin to consider self-subsistence in the short term… I can’t conclude what is better, but I think the whole ecosystem and supply chain need to think what’s better — self-subsistence or interdependence.”

Let’s stipulate the storm of user media (social audio, newsletters, live streaming) is evidence of something real and lasting. When this citizen media migrates to small business and the enterprise, we see that as confirmation, validation. Most of these efforts are in the investment phase, where startups and platforms consolidate ecosystems around the various disruptions.

Clubhouse is moving to a more careful onboarding process that eschews mandatory gobbling of your contacts data and your phone number as a requirement for invitations. Twitter is surprisingly far along on integrating a suite of pilot projects — its Clubhouse clone Spaces, the Revue newsletter creation and distribution tool, and whatever happens to the Periscope live video streaming services the company has abandoned as a standalone.

As the smoke clears, what emerges is a hybrid of work from anywhere and post-pandemic digital collaboration solutions. At the top of the stack, social audio delivers some real leadership in the casual way it captures user attention. While commuting listening is proscribed for at least the next quarter, exercise and mental health breaks pick up a lot of that deficit. Some of the resulting content is appointment focused, keynote events with industry leaders and celebrities. Smaller sessions are organized around self- and group-help concerns, and the usual assortment of get-rich schemes. Much of this competes directly with cable news and podcasts, and will likely absorb the older networks into the new paradigm over time.

You can see this at play in the streaming realignment, where cable-cutting is driving us toward broadband-based consumption of so-called linear television programming. Last night, we ended up switching from Comcast’s video access to CBS’s Grammy coverage in favor of IP streaming via the CBS All Access app (now renamed Paramount +.) The Comcast CBS channel was full of glitches and pixillation; the streaming version rock solid with what seemed like better video and audio quality. On the appointment television side of the equation, old-style network shows like This Is Us and Grey’s Anatomy are finding it more difficult to compete with Netflix, Prime, and other streaming originals. And then there are the kids, who refuse to even recognize anything they can’t stream as relevant.

Moving down the stack from streaming audio (I like that better than social audio as a thing) to the newsletter services, we discover what happens when fragmentation of the media produces too much content and not enough loyalty to a manageable number of suppliers. That loyalty thing is perhaps the new eyeballs, where the stickiness of the relationship is much more desirable for its ongoing lifetime value. Newsletters at their inception were aggregators built to skim the cream of relevant media, in effect replacing the home page and adding a social layer of authority. Now the glut has moved from posts and podcasts to the newsletters themselves.

To differentiate and encourage paid subscriptions, creators are now being wined and dined with tools for managing these microapp sites and competing with magazines and publishers for marquee authors. Newsletter stars start appearing on streaming audio in much the same way that Washington Post and New York Times reporters populate the CNN and MSNBC roundtables. Newsletter’s role as a blend of must reads is shifting to original material and a marketing channel for influence with the streaming audio communities. Twitter’s Revue newsletter tool already lets you drag and drop tweets into the latest issue. It seems a small tweak to use the newsletter as a calendar for upcoming Spaces notifications of events. The company has announced plans for Super Followers who can produce and receive subscribed content via this path between the platform and satellite services.

Twitter hasn’t been Super Clear on how or what video services they will maintain after they sunset Periscope, but closing the loop between streaming audio and on demand video programming gives Twitter a powerful advantage over services like Clubhouse that have fewer pieces of the puzzle. On the other hand, Twitter has to demonstrate newfound ability to launch and integrate the pieces to stay competitive with competitors both visible and in stealth. They include Facebook, Amazon and its growing ad platform, and streaming “Plus” services at a time where subscribers are dropping subscriptions to add new offerings from Disney, Apple, HBO Max, Paramount, and the cheaper free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) networks like Peacock and Hulu.

Working from anywhere is accelerating the streaming media transition. News becomes a notification-driven stream to dip in and out of as the vaccines begin to take hold. Work promotes attention and care of our values, while home brings a time of relearning how to breathe, treasuring our family and friends, and putting time into exploring things we have been fighting to keep alive: the rhythms of history, genealogy, climate change, the possibility that government can work for a change. As our anxiety moderates, we can dip into music, movies, sports, and other expressive uses of the powerful network we turned on to survive. Turn on, tune in, stay home.

Streaming audio can work for marketing, learning, sharing, and monetizing. It can also work for extending our collaboration with music, painting, storytelling, a kind of virtual comedy club, book club, and debating society. I can imagine the return of liner notes to the music experience, a kind of Prairie Home Companion writ small. The Grammys last night were awkward, strained by the exigencies of the virus. But the performances were bunched together, with the wonderful touch of the group of artists sitting on stools campfire-style after their song to listen and rock to the music of their fellow nominees. Clubhouse style.

We’re on the cusp of a powerful change in the way we live and work. Not just out of necessity but of a desire to fulfill the promise of global communication. We’ve laid the tracks of this new age of collaboration. Now we have to figure out what to do with it.

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 12, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

There’s been quite a bit of movement in the additive manufacturing space in recent months. If I had to pinpoint a reason, I would say that — much like robotics (another space I follow fairly closely) — the category has gotten a boost in interest from the pandemic. Medical applications are understandably of interest lately, as is alternative manufacturing.

Desktop Metal, Markforged and new-comer Mantel have all made pretty big announcements in recent weeks, and now Fortify is making the round with a significant raise. The Boston-based startup announced a $20 million Series B equity round, led by Cota Capital with additional participation from Accel Partners, Neotribe Ventures and Prelude Ventures.

Fortify is attempting to stake out a claim in material deposits. Using digital light processing (DLP) tech, the company can mix and print in a variety of different materials, with a wide range of properties. The list includes some useful traits, including electromagnetic and thermal.

Like Mantel, the company looks to be targeting manufacturing tools, including injection molding.

“Fortify has been focused on proving the viability of our product and market opportunity over the past 18+ months, and exceeded our goals set at the beginning of 2020,” CEO Josh Martin said in a release. “This next round will expand our go-to-market footprint in key verticals such as injection mold tooling while enabling us to capture market share in end-use electronic devices.”

Recent months have also found the company enlisting other 3D printing vets. Paul Dresens (ex Desktop Metal) signed on as VP of Engineering, while former GrabCad (a Stratasys acquisition) market exec Rob Stevens has signed on as an advisor.

MrBeast’s management company is getting into the venture business.

Night Media, the six-year-old, Dallas-based multimedia talent management company, is closing a debut fund with $20 million in capital commitments from the same, powerful, family-friendly online influencers who it manages, along with other social media stars.

The idea, says Night Media CEO Reed Duchscher, is to write initial checks of up to $300,000 into three categories: consumer-facing startups; gaming startups, especially those centered around user-generated content; and the creator economy, including startups supporting the creator economy.

The last is a world that Duchscher knows particularly well.

A native North Dakotan who was a wide receiver for North Dakota State University, Duchscher was working for a sports agency after graduating when he stumbled across a comedy group online called Dude Perfect. He so loved their work that he reached out to better understand who its members are and how they made money; within months, Duchscher struck on his own to work full-time with the group and seize on what appeared to be a big opportunity.

It was a savvy move. While Night Media no longer works with Dude Perfect, it now manages 16 other top influencer groups, with YouTube stars that include ZHC (19.7 million subscribers), Preston (15.6 million), Matt Stonie (13.7 million), Unspeakable (10.8 million), Azzyland (13.3 million), Typical Gamer (11.4 million) and Carter Sharer (7.6 million). Duchscher also notably represents MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, and who has amassed 55 million subscribers on YouTube and whose videos routinely rack up at least 30 million views. (He posts two to three each month.)

In a Bloomberg piece in December about Donaldson, who now oversees a team of 50, famed filmmaker Casey Neistat said of him: “He lives on a different planet than the rest of the YouTube world.”

Some might settle for that level of success. But Duchscher — who met Donaldson after sending him a direct message on Twitter —  has instead been helping Donaldson and his other clients think about next steps and where to invest the money they make from their social media endeavors.

Last year, toward that end, Night Media created a venture studio to incubate companies that its stars can help shape and grow. As part of one of those efforts, Donaldson has partnered with 300 ghost kitchens around the country to make and sell so-called Beast Burgers and other items that can be order through a dedicated app. Donaldson has also put his stamp on the second iteration of a game called Finger on the App.

Asked if MrBeastBurger or the app might be open to follow-on funding, Duchscher suggests that’s not necessarily the plan for the startups in the venture studio, though they are open to outside funding “depending on what we’d do with all that capital.”

Venture-type investment, he (somewhat refreshingly) adds, could create unnecessary “complexity” in some cases.

Still, Night Media’s talent is interested in learning, molding, and capitalizing from the trends impacting their industry. Enter the new venture fund, which could be the start of a much bigger business eventually.

Indeed, though Duchscher says a professional investor is joining the outfit this spring, he has himself been running the show and spending time with “people in the Valley and L.A. who have been in industry for 20 years and been through multiple funds and financial crises” in order to learn more about institutional investing. He cites Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, for example, of firms that are already sending him deal flow.

Asked if he’s also in conversation with the growing number of celebrity investors on the startup scene, Duchscher says there’s less of that, though he says he has talked quite a bit with Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures and even pulled the firm into a few deals, including Backbone, a company that makes a sleek game controller for iPhones.

It’s one of roughly a dozen startups that Night Media has helped fund to date. Another bet is a rewards app that pays users in bitcoin called Lolli and which is also backed by Craft Ventures and famed talent agent Guy Oseary. Another investment is Pearpop, an startup that invites fans to bid for shared screen time with their favorite TikTok. Italic, a marketplace that invites shoppers to buy luxury products directly from the manufacturers behind top brands, is also a portfolio company.

All have agreed to work with Night Media in exchange for access to its creators and their know-how — assets that Duchscher believes gives the outfit an edge that most VCs can’t offer.

Whether it all leads to a bigger fund down the road is the big question, not that Duchscher is spending much energy on it right now, he suggests. “It would depend on fund one and how quickly it gets deployed,” he says. “We’re not going to raise because we can. That’s never been the way we think or operate.”

He has more pressing concerns, in any case. A big part of his job is figuring out what to do with inbound interest in his clients, and there’s far more demand right now than there is inventory.

“Usually, people want to work with a specific creator” he notes, and there are only so many hours in the day.

Substack has attracted a number of high-profile writers to its newsletter platform — and it hasn’t been a secret that the venture-backed startup has lured some of them with sizable payments.

For example, a New Yorker article late last year identified several writers (Anne Helen Petersen, Matthew Yglesias)  who’d accepted “substantial” advances and others (Robert Christgau, Alison Roman) who’d started Substack newsletters without striking deals with the company.

However, a number of writers publishing via Substack have begun pointing out that this strategy makes the company seem less like a technology platform and more like a media company (a familiar debate around Facebook and other online giants) — or at the very least, like a technology platform that also makes editorial decisions which are subject to criticism.

Last week, the writer Jude Ellison Sady Doyle pointed to writers like Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald and Freddie de Boer (several of whom departed larger publications, supposedly turning to Substack for greater editorial independence) and suggested that the platform has become “famous for giving massive advances […] to people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.”

Doyle initially said that they would continue publishing via Substack but would not charge a subscription fee to any readers who (like Doyle) identify as trans. Later, they added an update saying they’d be moving to a different platform called Ghost.

Similarly, science journalist and science fiction writer Annalee Newitz wrote yesterday that they would be leaving the platform as well. And as part of their farewell, they described Substack as a “scam”: “For all we know, every single one of Substack’s top newsletters is supported by money from Substack. Until Substack reveals who exactly is on its payroll, its promises that anyone can make money on a newsletter are tainted.”

Substack has responded in with two posts of its own. In the first, published last week, co-founder Hamish McKenzie outlines the details of what the company calls its Substack Pro program — it offers select writers an advance payment for their first year on the platform, then keeps 85% of the writers’ subscription revenue. After that, there’s no guaranteed payment, but writers get to keep 90% of their revenue. (The company also offers legal support and healthcare stipends.)

“We see these deals as business decisions, not editorial ones,” McKenzie wrote. “We don’t commission or edit stories. We don’t hire writers, or manage them. The writers, not Substack, are the owners. No-one writes for Substack – they write for their own publications.”

The second post (bylined by McKenzie and his co-founders Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi) provides additional details about who’s in the program — more than half women, more than one-third people of color, diverse viewpoints but “none that can be reasonably construed as anti-trans” —without actually naming names.

“So far, the small number of writers who have chosen to share their deals – coupled with some wrong assumptions about who might be part of the program – has created a distorted perception of the overall makeup of the group, leading to incorrect inferences about Substack’s business strategy,” the Substack founders wrote.

As for whether those writers are being held to any standards, the founders said, “We will continue to require all writers to abide by Substack’s content guidelines, which guard against harassment and threats. But we will also stick to a hands-off approach to censorship, as laid out in our statement about our content moderation philosophy.”

Greenwald, for his part, dismissed the criticism as “petty Substack censors” whose position boils down to, “because you refuse to remove from your platform the writers I hate who have built a very large readership of their own, I’m taking myself & my couple of dozen readers elsewhere in protest.”

But when I reached out to Newitz (a friend of mine) via email, they told me that the key issue is transparency.

“If Substack won’t tell us who they are paying, we can’t figure out who on the site has grown their audience organically, and who is getting juiced,” Newitz said. “It’s blatantly misleading for people who are trying to figure out whether they can make money on the platform. Plus, keeping their Pro list secret means we can’t verify Substack’s claims about how its staff writers are on ‘all sides’ of the political spectrum.”