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Ember today announced that founder Clay Alexander will transition to Group CEO effective February 16. In his place, the Los Angeles-based smart mug company is bringing on Jim Rowan as Consumer CEO. The executive served as CEO of Dyson from 2017 to 2020, after five years as COO.
It’s a big get for a relatively small company like Ember, which is best known for its smart, heated mugs. Founded in 2012, the hardware startup most recently raised a $20 million Series D in early 2019, bringing its total funding up to just shy of $50 million.
Alexander’s continued role at the company points to additional categories for Ember beyond consumer. “When I founded Ember, I knew there were endless applications for our temperature control technology and with Jim joining our team, we’ll be able to focus on our emerging healthcare vertical and use our technology to help improve and even save lives,” the exec said in a statement.
Courtesy of clever technology and smart design, the company has built a pretty sizable footprint for what might otherwise be a fairly niche product, expanding retail sales to Target, Costco, Best Buy and Starbucks, among others. The startup has done so while maintaining a low headcount of around 100 staffers.
“They have great IP, great design and great innovation, all around precise temperature control,” Rowan said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Obviously that started with the temperature control mugs and flasks, but that IP lends itself to so many other application. For me, that golden thread of being able to use that in myriad of different industries and markets is really, really exciting. One of them, of course, is the cold chain, which has become a lot more important since the beginning of the pandemic. That’s a good indication of how you can disrupt and innovate in new markets.
Rowan has previously served as the COO of BlackBerry and as a senior exec at Flextronics. After exiting Dyson, he joined both PCH International and KKR as an advisor. It’s Dyson, however, that provides the most direct analogy for what the executive hoping to do at Ember. At its core, Dyson is a company that moves air. That translates to vacuums, fans, hairdryers and myriad other product categories.
The underlying question is how Ember’s proprietary heating and cooling tech can translate to other fields. On an industrial level, it means, potentially, helping keep foodstuff and medicine at a predetermined temperate while shipping in the international cold chain. It also means additional consumer products built around the same underlying tech.
“There will be a lot more products that come out, beyond the current mugs and travel mugs,” Rowan says. “There’s a whole bunch of new products which are in the consumer pipeline and will launch in the next year or couple of years. And then you have the expansion into new geographies with existing products.”
That largely means Asia (Rowan will remain based in Singapore) and Europe. Thus far Ember’s footprint has been U.S.-centric, though a push toward online commerce amid the pandemic has helped expand it some. There does, however, remain a question of how high the ceiling is on adoption for a $130 electric smart mug. Ember has yet to release any actual numbers, and Rowan, whose experience at Dyson has more than familiarized him with selling premium products at a premium price point, isn’t ready to commit to a lower price point or less premium take on the space.
It’s worth noting, of course, that low end of the mug category is ready available at your local 99 cent store, and that’s not likely a space Ember is raring to compete in. And certainly those products — unlike its current lineup — likely wouldn’t end up in Apple Stores. Instead, it seems likely the company will continue a play as a premium consumer brand into additional categories at a more rapid pace. “The actual technology can expand into a whole bunch of new areas beyond just beverages because of the temperature control technology,” Rowan said.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/12/ember-names-former-dyson-head-as-consumer-ceo/
One year after nabbing $590 million from investors led by Toyota, and a few months after picking up Uber’s flying taxi business, Joby Aviation is reportedly in talks to go public in a SPAC deal that would value the electric plane manufacturer at nearly $5.7 billion.
News of a potential deal comes on the heels of another big SPAC transaction in electric planes, for Archer Aviation. If the Financial Times‘ reporting is accurate, then that would mean that the two will soon be publicly traded at a total value approaching $10 billion.
It’s a heady time for startups making vehicles powered by anything other than hydrocarbons, and the SPAC wave has hit it hard.
Electric car companies Arrival, Canoo, ChargePoint, Fisker, Lordstown Motors, Proterra and The Lion Electric Company are some of the companies that have merged with SPACs — or announced plans to — in the past year.
Now it appears that any company that has anything to do with the electrification of any mode of transportation is going to get waved onto the runway for a public listing through a special purpose acquisition company vehicle — a wildly popular route at the moment for companies that might find traditional IPO listings more challenging to carry out but would rather not stay in startup mode when it comes to fundraising.
The investment group reportedly taking Joby to the moon! out to public markets is led by the billionaire tech entrepreneurs and investors Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, and Mark Pincus, who launched the casual gaming company, Zynga.
Together the two men had formed Reinvent Technology Partners, a special purpose acquisition company, earlier in 2020. The shell company went public and raised $690 million to make a deal.
Any transaction for Joby would be a win for the company’s backers including Toyota, Baillie Gifford, Intel Capital, JetBlue Technology Ventures (the investment arm of the US-based airline), and Uber, which invested $125 million into Joby.
Joby has a prototype that has already taken 600 flights, but has yet to be certified by the Federal Aviation Administration. And the success of any transaction between the company and Hoffman and Pincus’ SPAC group is far from a sure thing, as the FT noted.
The deal would require an additional capital infusion into the SPAC that the two men established, and without that extra cash, all bets are off. Indeed, that is probably one reason why anyone is reading about this now.
Alternatively powered transportation vehicles of all stripes and covering all modes of travel are the rage right now among the public investment crowd. Part of that is due to rising pressure among institutional investors to find companies with an environmental, sustainability, and good governance thesis that they can invest in, and part of that is due to tailwinds coming from government regulations pushing for the decarbonization of fleets in a bid to curb global warming.
The environmental impact is one chief reason that United chief executive Scott Kirby cited when speaking about his company’s $1 billion purchase order from the electric plane company that actually announced it would be pursuing a public offering through a SPAC earlier this week.
“By working with Archer, United is showing the aviation industry that now is the time to embrace cleaner, more efficient modes of transportation,” Kirby said. “With the right technology, we can curb the impact aircraft have on the planet, but we have to identify the next generation of companies who will make this a reality early and find ways to help them get off the ground.”
It’s also an investment in a possible new business line that could eventually shuttle United passengers to and from an airport, as TechCrunch reported earlier. United projected that a trip in one of Archer’s eVTOL aircraft could reduce CO2 emissions by up to 50% per passenger traveling between Hollywood and Los Angeles International Airport.
The agreement to go public and the order from United Airlines comes less than a year after Archer Aviation came out of stealth. Archer was co-founded in 2018 by Adam Goldstein and Brett Adcock, who sold their software-as-a-service company Vettery to The Adecco Group for more than $100 million. The company’s primary backer was Marc Lore, who sold his company Jet.com to Walmart in 2016 for $3.3 billion. Lore was Walmart’s e-commerce chief until January.
For any SPAC investors or venture capitalists worried that they’re now left out of the EV plane investment bonanza, take heart! There’s still the German tech developer, Lilium. And if an investor is interested in supersonic travel, there’s always Boom.
Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey and rapper Jay Z have created an endowment to fund bitcoin development initially in Africa and India, Dorsey said Friday.
The duo is putting 500 Bitcoin, which is currently worth $23.6 million, in the endowment called ₿trust. The fund will be set up as a blind irrevocable trust, Dorsey said, adding that the duo won’t be giving any direction to the team.
₿trust is looking to hire three board members. The mission of the fund is to “make bitcoin the internet’s currency,” a job application describes.
Governments in both Africa and India have so far been reluctant to embrace bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Friday’s move comes as New Delhi is inching closer to introduce a law that would ban private cryptocurrencies in the nation.
Dorsey has long supported the adoption of cryptocurrency. Square already supports Bitcoin and last year acquired about $50 million worth of bitcoin for its corporate treasury, and Twitter is studying the potential use of Bitcoin to pay its employees and vendors.
In an interview with CNBC earlier this week, Twitter Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal said, “We’ve done a lot of the upfront thinking to consider how we might pay employees should they ask to be paid in bitcoin, how we might pay a vendor if they ask to be [paid] in bitcoin and whether we need to have bitcoin on our balance sheet should that happen. It’s something we continue to study and look at, we want to be thoughtful about over time, but we haven’t made any changes yet.”
Many high-profile industry executives have called for nations to embrace Bitcoin. Balaji Srinivasan, an angel investor and entrepreneur who previously served as the Chief Technology Officer of Coinbase, earlier this month made a case for why India should embrace bitcoin.
“India has the talent to pull this off. Such a move would make international headlines, attract global support from the world’s technologists and financiers, differentiate India from the increasingly zero-sum economic policies pushed by America and China, and put the country at the forefront of a trillion dollar industry,” he wrote, envisioning the potential unblocking bitcoin would create for India.
This is a developing story. More to follow….
Sweden’s data protection authority, the IMY, has fined the local police authority €250,000 ($300k+) for unlawful use of the controversial facial recognition software, Clearview AI, in breach of the country’s Criminal Data Act.
As part of the enforcement the police must conduct further training and education of staff in order to avoid any future processing of personal data in breach of data protection rules and regulations.
The authority has also been ordered to inform people whose personal data was sent to Clearview — when confidentiality rules allow it to do so, per the IMY.
Its investigation found that the police had used the facial recognition tool on a number of occasions and that several employees had used it without prior authorization.
Earlier this month Canadian privacy authorities found Clearview had breached local laws when it collected photos of people to plug into its facial recognition database without their knowledge or permission.
“IMY concludes that the Police has not fulfilled its obligations as a data controller on a number of accounts with regards to the use of Clearview AI. The Police has failed to implement sufficient organisational measures to ensure and be able to demonstrate that the processing of personal data in this case has been carried out in compliance with the Criminal Data Act. When using Clearview AI the Police has unlawfully processed biometric data for facial recognition as well as having failed to conduct a data protection impact assessment which this case of processing would require,” the Swedish data protection authority writes in a press release.
The IMY’s full decision can be found here (in Swedish).
“There are clearly defined rules and regulations on how the Police Authority may process personal data, especially for law enforcement purposes. It is the responsibility of the Police to ensure that employees are aware of those rules,” added Elena Mazzotti Pallard, legal advisor at IMY, in a statement.
The fine (SEK2.5M in local currency) was decided on the basis of an overall assessment, per the IMY, though it falls quite a way short of the maximum possible under Swedish law for the violations in question — which the watchdog notes would be SEK10M. (The authority’s decision notes that not knowing the rules or having inadequate procedures in place are not a reason to reduce a penalty fee so it’s not entirely clear why the police avoided a bigger fine.)
The data authority said it was not possible to determine what had happened to the data of the people whose photos the police authority had sent to Clearview — such as whether the company still stored the information. So it has also ordered the police to take steps to ensure Clearview deletes the data.
The IMY said it investigated the police’s use of the controversial technology following reports in local media.
Just over a year ago, US-based Clearview AI was revealed by the New York Times to have amassed a database of billions of photos of people’s faces — including by scraping public social media postings and harvesting people’s sensitive biometric data without individuals’ knowledge or consent.
European Union data protection law puts a high bar on the processing of special category data, such as biometrics.
Ad hoc use by police of a commercial facial recognition database — with seemingly zero attention paid to local data protection law — evidently does not meet that bar.
Last month it emerged that the Hamburg data protection authority had instigating proceedings against Clearview following a complaint by a German resident over consentless processing of his biometric data.
The Hamburg authority cited Article 9 (1) of the GDPR, which prohibits the processing of biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, unless the individual has given explicit consent (or for a number of other narrow exceptions which it said had not been met) — thereby finding Clearview’s processing unlawful.
However the German authority only made a narrow order for the deletion of the individual complainant’s mathematical hash values (which represent the biometric profile).
It did not order deletion of the photos themselves. It also did not issue a pan-EU order banning the collection of any European resident’s photos as it could have done and as European privacy campaign group, noyb, had been pushing for.
noyb is encouraging all EU residents to use forms on Clearview AI’s website to ask the company for a copy of their data and ask it to delete any data it has on them, as well as to object to being included in its database. It also recommends that individuals who finds Clearview holds their data submit a complaint against the company with their local DPA.
European Union lawmakers are in the process of drawing up a risk-based framework to regulate applications of artificial intelligence — with draft legislation expected to be put forward this year although the Commission intends it to work in concert with data protections already baked into the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Earlier this month the controversial facial recognition company was ruled illegal by Canadian privacy authorities — who warned they would “pursue other actions” if the company does not follow recommendations that include stopping the collection of Canadians’ data and deleting all previously collected images.
Clearview said it had stopped providing its tech to Canadian customers last summer.
It is also facing a class action lawsuit in the U.S. citing Illinois’ biometric protection laws.
Last summer the UK and Australian data protection watchdogs announced a joint investigation into Clearview’s personal data handling practices. That probe is ongoing.
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