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It’s almost too simple. You get a tablet made of household chemicals that can be dissolved in water which can become a cleaning spray for the kitchen, glass and bathroom, with no need to ship the water it is dissolved into because it literally comes out of your tap. That was the premise of Munich-based startup everdrop and it’s been a hit not just with consumers, but also with investors. It’s now raised an €18m ($21.8m) Series A funding round led by Felix Capital, with participation from HV Capital and Vorwerk Ventures. Everdrop now plans to develop a wider range of sustainable household products and market them across Europe, and eventually the US.
Launched in Dec 2019, the cleaning tablet also removes the need for single-use plastic bottles, thus appealing to environmentally conscious consumers, (unusually for a consumer good company, the startup has 110,000 followers on Instagram).
Everdrop estimates it was able to eliminate over 2.5 million single-use plastic bottles with their tabs.
David Löwe, Co-Founder of everdrop told me in an interview that while it might be possible to clone the company’s formats, it would not be easy to replicate its water hardness calculator: “Plus, the individualizing of the laundry detergent is quite unique. I think there’s no one out there in other countries who are doing that at the moment… But obviously, other companies could potentially do that too.”
Everdrop competes with Grove Collaborative, Blueland and to some extent The Honest Company.
Löwe told me: “If I’m very honest, it would be cool if the other companies would do it because this is something that I’m really convinced about. If we inspire with our success, the big corporations could finally change into more sustainable products.”
As well as the tablet, everdrop now has a range of sustainable laundry detergents, also microplastic-free, which addresses water hardness by tailoring the detergent to the water in the customer’s home area. This means everdrop can save up to 50% of the unnecessary surfactants in the detergent. Laundry detergent is the biggest chemical emitter in private households. Everdrop estimates its approach saves 250 tons of unnecessary surfactants from going into the environment.
Its latest product is a “naked” dishwasher tablet which doesn’t have the plastic wrapper that usually envelops these products.
David Fischer, investor at HV Capital said: “It is incredible how a truly sustainable brand such as everdrop has a similar growth trajectory in its inception year as its D2C peers Hims and DollarShaveClub.”
Bay Area-based AI startup Symbio today announced its “official launch.” Backed by a total of $30 million in funding, the company has struck deals with both Nissan and Toyota to implement its software in U.S.-based factories.
The company says its SymbioDCS technology is capable of dramatically increasing automation with factory robots on the assembly line.
“To the end customer, the proposition is pretty straightforward,” CEO and co-founder Max Reynolds tells TechCrunch. “We’re improving the efficiency of their automation. The high-level goal is to increase the capacity of the factory and enable them to build more product, more quickly, more flexibly. “
The company closed a $15 million Series B in December of last year. That adds to a $12 million Series A in 2018, $2.5 million seed two years prior and a $500,000 pre-seed. This latest round was led by ACME Capital, joining existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse Ventures and The House Fund.
Image Credits: Symbio
“Instead of exclusively providing automation solutions, Symbio is also designing the tools that enable the developers and domain experts working in manufacturing to create their own automation solutions and easily adapt them to new tasks,” UC Berkeley professor Anca Dragan said in a statement tied to the news. “To do this, they are building products that leverage AI strengths and human insight in a symbiotic way.”
Founded in 2014, the company employs around 40, mostly engineers, largely based in California. Reynolds explains that the current level of automated manufacturing in automotive is actually far lower than one might expect. “Assembly is less than 5% automated, across the board,” he says. “Even in this core vertical, there’s a ton of headroom and opportunity for growth.”
India’s Flipkart said on Wednesday it will deploy more than 25,000 electric vehicles in its supply chain by 2030 as the Walmart-owned e-commerce giant looks to achieve a 100% transition to electric mobility in the next 10 years.
The Bangalore-headquartered firm said it has partnered with leading EV makers including Hero Electric, Mahindra Electric, and Piaggio to build vehicles for its first and last mile delivery fleets across the country.
The announcement comes a day after rival Amazon said it had partnered with Mahindra Electric to develop “close to hundred” electric three-wheeler in India. The American e-commerce giant last year pledged to deploy 10,000 electric vehicles in the country by 2025.
Hey, India. We’re rolling out our new fleet of electric delivery rickshaws. Fully electric. Zero carbon. #ClimatePledge pic.twitter.com/qFXdZOsY4y
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) January 20, 2020
Flipkart said its electric fleet will include two-wheeler, three-wheeler, and four-wheeler vehicles, all of which will be designed and assembled in India. The company said it has already started to pilot two-wheeler and three-wheeler electric vehicles in “multiple locations” in India including Delhi, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and Guwahati.
In recent years, New Delhi has pushed to replace gasoline and diesel vehicles in India with environmentally friendly electric vehicles. Reuters reported in 2019 that the Indian government was planning to order ride-hailing firms such as Ola and Uber to convert 40% of their fleets to electric by April 2026.
“Electrification of the logistics fleet is a key part of Flipkart’s larger sustainability goal and in line with our commitment to the Climate Group’s EV100 initiative,” said Amitesh Jha, SVP of Ekart and Marketplace at Flipkart, in a statement.
“In this journey of making our logistics fleet completely electric by 2030, we will collaborate and work with leading local players to procure and deploy electric vehicles while supporting the required infrastructure growth. We understand the relevance of electric mobility in achieving both business and sustainability goals and are committed to paving the way for greater adoption of EVs across the country,” he added.
The company said over the past year it has worked to create a network of ecosystem partners across charging providers, skill development agencies, aggregators, and original equipment manufacturers.
The company, which is expected to publicly list later this year, identified three models that will feature in its electric vehicles fleet: Nyx series by Hero Electric, which offers extended driving range of up to 150 kilometers (93.2 miles) per charge; Treo Zor by Mahindra Electric, which features “highest-in-class payload of 550kg (1212.5 pounds)”; and Ape’ E Xtra FX by Piaggio.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/24/flipkart-to-deploy-over-25000-electric-vehicles-by-2030/
The Facebook-Australia news battle seems to have reached an end, Android gets an update and Lucid Motors is going public via SPAC. This is your Daily Crunch for February 23, 2021.
The big story: Facebook brings news sharing back to Australia
Last week, Facebook responded to the Australian government’s proposed law requiring internet platforms to strike revenue-sharing agreements with news publishers by blocking news sharing and viewing for users in the country. But with the government amending the law, Facebook said it will restore news sharing in the “coming days.”
Among other things, the amendments call for a two-month mediation period before Facebook is forced into arbitration with publishers, and it also says the government will consider commercial agreements that the platforms have made with local publishers before deciding whether the law applies to them.
William Easton, Facebook’s managing director for Australia and New Zealand, said in a statement that the amendments address “core concerns about allowing commercial deals that recognize the value our platform provides to publishers relative to the value we receive from them.”
The tech giants
Android’s latest update will let you schedule texts, secure your passwords and more — This update will integrate a feature called Password Checkup to alert you to passwords you’re using that have been previously exposed.
Twitter relaunches test that asks users to revise harmful replies — Twitter is running a new test that will ask users to pause and think before they tweet.
Area 120 is beginning to use Google’s massive reach to scale HTML5 GameSnacks platform — GameSnacks is an HTML5 gaming platform where titles are bite-sized and load much faster.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Lucid Motors strikes SPAC deal to go public with $24B valuation — This will be the largest deal yet between a blank-check company and an electric vehicle startup.
Shippo raises $45M more at $495M valuation as e-commerce booms — The startup provides shipping-related services to e-commerce companies.
Reddit ups Series E round by another $116M — Reddit had already announced a $250 million Series E earlier this month.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
How to overcome the challenges of switching to usage-based pricing — The usage-based pricing model almost feels like a cheat code, according to OpenView’s Kyle Poyar.
Oscar Health’s initial IPO price is so high, it makes me want to swear — Alex Wilhelm doesn’t mince words: “Public investors have lost their damn minds.”
RIBS: The messaging framework for every company and product — The test is designed to tell you if your story is memorable, so you can turn it into a compelling message.
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
Announcing the complete agenda for TC Sessions: Justice — Our second-ever dedicated event to diversity, equity, inclusion and labor in tech is coming up on March 3.
Six Miami-based investors share their views on the region’s startup scene — Investors see a huge opportunity for the region to become a major startup hub by utilizing its diverse workforce and wonderful quality of life.
SolarWinds hackers targeted NASA, Federal Aviation Administration networks — Hackers are said to have broken into the networks of U.S. space agency NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration as part of a wider espionage campaign.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/23/daily-crunch-facebook-brings-news-sharing-back-to-australia/
SpaceX hasn’t issue any public statement about the $850 million in fresh funding CNBC reported it raised last week, but a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published today confirms the round. SpaceX’s funding was said to value the company at around $74 billion, with a per-share value moon the round set at around $420.
Investment firm Sequoia led the considerable raise, and has now put over $600 million into the Elon Musk-led space company overall between this and a round it participated in in 2020, according to Bloomberg. CNBC’s report also said that a secondary sale of existing shares generated an additional $750 million in capital for the company, putting the total new money available for SpaceX’s use at $1.6 billion – not too far shy of the $2 billion it raised at a valuation of $46 billion last August.
That probably seems like a lot of money to raise in such less than a year. But few companies – private or otherwise – have the kind of capital needs of SpaceX. While it’s been able to build a thriving launch business on the money raised during the first part of its now nearly two-decade existence, that hasn’t slowed the rate at which it’s been undertaking big new projects with tremendous upfront costs.
Currently, SpaceX is rapidly building new prototypes of its Starship, a next-generation reusable rocket with multiple times the cargo capacity of its current Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 cargo nosecone. It has flown a number of prototypes – and lost two in the process due to missed landings. The company typically has at least two new prototypes under construction simultaneously, and had been operating at that pace for many months now, with a highly manual production process for both the rockets and the new engines that power them.
Meanwhile, it’s also building out Starlink – the global broadband internet satellite constellation that it wants to scale from its current 1,000+ size, to more than 12,000 for final, world-spanning coverage reach. To scale it quickly and get its service operational (which it now is, to select areas in North America), SpaceX has been launching its own dedicated Falcon 9 rockets with 60 Starlink satellites on each. Since the company is its own customer for the majority of those missions, they’re entirely operating expenditure. Musk has estimated that fully deploying Starlink will take around $10 billion.
Both of these projects – Starship and Starlink – carry massive upfront costs, but they also have a lot of potential long-term upside; hence the skyrocketing valuation as both efforts begin to produce positive results, between Starship’s high-altitude tests, and Starlink’s initial service availability.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/23/spacexs-new-850-million-raise-confirmed-in-sec-filing/
