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Revel, the shared electric moped startup, is building a DC fast-charging station for electric vehicles in New York City, the first in a new business venture that will eventually spread to other cities.
The company said Wednesday that this new “Superhub,” which is located at the former Pfizer building in Brooklyn, will contain 30 chargers and be open to the public 24 hours a day. This will be the first in a network of Superhubs opened by Revel across New York City, the company said.
Revel didn’t build the EV charging infrastructure in house. Instead, it is using Tritium’s new RTM75 model for the first 10 chargers at its Brooklyn site, which will go live this spring. These chargers are designed to delivery with 100 additional miles of charge to an electric vehicle in about 20 minutes, according to Revel.
The EV charging business has been couched by Revel as a mission to electrify cities. The move comes as a growing number of automakers, including legacy companies like GM, Ford and VW Group along with new entrant Rivian and EV leader Tesla add more electric vehicles to their portfolios.
Revel’s expansion into charging marks its first new product line since launching a shared fleet of electric mopeds in 2018. Revel, founded by Frank Reig and Paul Suhey, started with a pilot program in Brooklyn and later expanded to Queens, the Bronx and sections of Manhattan. It has been on a fast-paced growth track thanks to the $27.6 million in capital raised October 2019 in a Series A round led by Ibex Investors. The equity round included newcomer Toyota AI Ventures and further investments from Blue Collective, Launch Capital and Maniv Mobility.
Several thousands mopeds are available to rent in New York City today. Revel expanded its shared moped business to other cities such as Austin, Miami and Washington, D.C in its first 18 months of operation. Last year, the company launched in Oakland and received a permit in July 2020 to operate in San Francisco.
Shared mopeds haven’t been successful everywhere. Revel pulled out of Austin in December. Reig said at the time that the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused ridership to fall across shared micromobility services, along with the city’s deep-rooted car culture was proven difficult to penetrate.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/electric-moped-startup-revel-launches-an-ev-charging-business/
Box announced this morning that it has agreed to acquire eSignature startup SignRequest for $55 million.The acquisition gives the company a native signature component it has been lacking and opens up new workflows for the company.
Box CEO Aaron Levie says the company has seen increased demand from customers to digitize more of their workflows, and this acquisition is about giving them a signature component right inside Box that will be known as Box Sign moving forward. “With Box Sign, customers can have a seamless esignature experience right where their content already lives,” Levie told me.
While Box has partnerships with other eSignature vendors, this gives it one to call its own, one that will be built into Box starting this summer. As we have learned during this pandemic, the more work we can do remotely, the safer it is. Even after the pandemic ends and we get back to more face-to-face interactions, being able to do things fully in the cloud and removing paper from the workflow will speed up everything.
“The massive push to remote work effectively instantly highlighted for every enterprise where their digital workflows were breaking down. And eSignature was a major part of that — too many industries still rely on paper based processes,” he said.
Levie says that the signature component has been a key missing piece from the platform. “As for our platform, when you look at Snowflake, they’re the data cloud. Salesforce is the sales cloud. Adobe is the marketing cloud. We want to build the content cloud. Imagine one platform that can power the entire lifecycle of content. eSignature has been a major missing link for critical workflows,” he said.
He believes this will open up the platform for a number of scenarios, that while possible before, could not flow as easily between Box components. “Having SignRequest gets us more natively into mission critical workflows like customer contracts, vendor onboarding, healthcare onboarding and supply chain collaboration,” Levie explained.
It’s worth noting that Dropbox acquired HelloSign for $230 million two years ago to provide it with a similar kind of functionality and workflow capability, but analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe from Deep Analysis, a firm that follows the content management market, says this wasn’t really in reaction to that.
“I think what is interesting here is that Box is going to integrate SignRequest and bundle it as part of the standard service. That’s what really caught my eye as the challenge with eSig is that it’s typically a separate product and so gets limited use. They bought it partly in response to Dropbox, but it was a hole that needed fixing regardless so would have done so anyway,” Pelz-Sharpe explained.
As for SignRequest, the company was founded in the Netherlands in 2014. Neither Pitchbook nor Crunchbase has a record of it raising funds. The plan is for the company’s employees to join Box and help build the signature component that will become Box Sign. According to a message to customers on the company website, existing customers will have the opportunity over the next year to move to Box Sign, and get all of the other components of the Box platform.
Levie says the basic Box Sign function will be built into the platform at no additional charge, but there will be more advanced features coming that they could charge for. The deal is expected to close soon with the SignRequest team remaining in The Netherlands.
Many founders only know their own experience fundraising and don’t hear much about what other founders went through. On Extra Crunch Live today, we’re going to remedy that.
Grafana Labs has raised upward of $75 million since it launched in 2014. Lightspeed Venture Partners, and partner Gaurav Gupta to be specific, led both the startup’s Series A and Series B rounds. As far as commitments go, that’s a pretty significant one.
The new and improved Extra Crunch Live pairs founders and the investors who led their earlier rounds to talk about how the deal went down, from the moment they met to the conversations they had (including some disagreements) to the relationship as it exists today. Hell, we may even take a peek at the original pitch deck that made it all happen.
Then, we’ll turn our eyes back to you, the audience. That same founder/investor duo (in this case, Grafana Labs CEO Raj Dutt and LVP’s Gaurav Gupta) will take a look at your pitch decks and give their own feedback. (If you haven’t yet submitted a pitch deck to be torn down on Extra Crunch Live, you can do so here.)
The hour-long episode is sandwiched between two 30-minute rounds of networking. From start to finish, it goes from 11:30 a.m. PST/2:30 p.m. EST to 1:30 p.m. PST/4:30 p.m. EST. And Extra Crunch Live will come to you at the same time, every week, with a new pair of speakers.
So let’s learn a little bit more about Gupta and Dutt.
Before becoming an investor, Gupta enjoyed a rich career in the product development sphere, holding positions at Elastic (where he led product management), Splunk (VP of Products), as well as Google, Gateway and the McKenna Group. He joined Lightspeed in 2019 as a partner, focusing primarily on enterprise software. He’s led investments in Impira, Blameless, Hasura and Panther, and of course, Grafana. He sits on the board of the last three companies in that list.
Dutt is the co-founder and CEO at Grafana Labs, but the fast-growing company isn’t his first go at entrepreneurialism. Dutt also founded and led Voxel, a cloud-hosting startup that was acquired by Internap for $30 million in 2012.
We’re absolutely thrilled to have Gupta and Dutt join us on our first episode of Extra Crunch Live in 2021. As a reminder, Extra Crunch Live is for Extra Crunch members only. We’re coming to you with a new pair of speakers every week, and you can catch everything you missed on-demand if you can’t join us live. It’s worth the cost of the subscription on its own, but EC members also get access to our premium content, including market maps and investor surveys. Long story short? Subscribe, smarty. You won’t regret it.
Oh, and here’s a look at other speakers you can expect to see on Extra Crunch Live:
Aydin Senkut (Felicis) + Kevin Busque (Guideline) — February 10
Steve Loughlin (Accel) + Jason Boehmig (Ironclad) — February 17
Matt Harris (Bain Capital Ventures) + Isaac Oates (Justworks) — February 24
And that’s just the February slate!
All the details to register for this upcoming episode (and more) are available below. Can’t wait to see you there!
Making and keeping the web accessible is a full-time job, and like any other development role, accessibility tools need to evolve to keep up with the times. Evinced is a startup that promises both richer and faster checks of websites in production or in progress, and it just raised $17M to take its tools to the next level.
Because accessibility problems can happy in so many ways, it often takes a lot of manual code review to catch the errors. Even a team thinking about making their site fully accessible from the start — which should be everyone — can miss that this script doesn’t hook into that variable right if this menu is opened, and so on.
There’s automated code review, but it can be slow and bulky. Evinced is making a powerful, streamlined tool that checks a website in a fraction of a second while you’re using it, presenting the problems in a way that’s easy for devs to share and address. It also doesn’t trip up on the fancy, javascript-heavy web apps that millions use today.
Here’s an example of a modern website that looks fine but is obviously (for demo purposes) riddled with accessibility issues. The video gives a good breakdown of what this part of the Evinced product does:
Honestly, that’s how it feels like it ought to look, but existing enterprise-level tools probably aren’t quite so efficient. And as you can see, the tool responds instantly while the user (that is to say, the developer) proceeds through the various actions the site enables. It could be, after all, that auditing the site before anyone fills in a form or pulls down any menus could give a misleading green light.
The inspector also brings in a bit of AI in the form of smart rules and computer vision, so if an element looks like a menu or button but isn’t labeled correctly, it isn’t fooled. Those elements do have distinct styles and roles: if something can be clicked and turns into a list that the user chooses from, well, it’s a pulldown menu whether it’s called that or not.
Image Credits: Evinced
Naturally there are also quick fixes suggested and the ability to easily export the issues for formal inspection by the boss, as well as other expected features for a web development tool. It’s available as a Chrome extension, or as an API or automated part of other analysis or commit actions, throwing its list of errors in with the rest.
The company formed back in 2018, when they started development. The next year they hooked up with a few large enterprises to see about integrating and testing within their ecosystems. Capitol One became their biggest customer and is now an investor.
“We have since deployed our products in production at Capital One (means they are used every day – and power their end-to-end accessibility operations – see the Capital One blog) and others. These are paying customers that have an enterprise license,” said Founder and CEO, Navin Thandani.
Indeed, as Capitol One explains:
Capital One partnered with Evinced early, to guide their development with a particular focus on: helping developers release accessible code integrating multiple automated testing steps through the build and deployment lifecycle building products that can automatically scan for accessibility across a full web property (including through logins and internal repositories), and do this fast.
Capital One partnered with Evinced early, to guide their development with a particular focus on: helping developers release accessible code integrating multiple automated testing steps through the build and deployment lifecycle building products that can automatically scan for accessibility across a full web property (including through logins and internal repositories), and do this fast.
We’ve seen Evinced discover as much as 10x more critical accessibility issues than we were previously finding through automated testing alone. An even greater number of issues are discovered when a site is more interactive, including keyboard and screen reader usability issues.
Automated testing on a large enterprise scale can be an extremely complex and time consuming effort. Evinced is speedy and reliable, with 40x faster execution, enabling us to cut our processing time in some cases from 4-5 days down to less than 3 hours (and is being further optimized).
Glowing words, even if they are from an investor (technically Capital One Ventures, but still).
The company’s $17M series A was co-led by M12 BGV, and Capital One Ventures and included previous investors Engineering Capital.
As a sort of debut celebration present, Evinced is announcing its free tiers of service, including an iOS app accessibility debugger, which should be helpful to all the folks making apps who don’t know a thing about WCAG guidelines and ARIA roles. There’s also a free “community edition” site scanner that admins can sign up to be approved for, and a free trial for enterprises that want to give it a shot.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/evinced-raises-17m-to-speed-up-accessibility-testing-for-the-web/
Amazon has started making deliveries to customers in Los Angeles using electric vans designed and built by Rivian.
The electric vans, which are part of Amazon’s 2040 climate pledge, won’t go into series production until the end of the year, according to an update Wednesday by the company. Amazon declined to reveal how many electric vans were in the test fleet.
The customer deliveries are part of continuous testing being conducted by Amazon and Rivian to measure performance as well as safety durability in various climates and geographies. Road tests first started more than four months ago. The current fleet of vehicles was built at Rivian’s headquarters in Plymouth, Michigan and can drive up to 150 miles on a single charge. Rivian engineers will continue to refine the vehicles for the start of production at its Normal, Illinois factory.
Image Credits: Amazon
In the meantime, these electric vehicles will continue to pop up on delivery routes in up to 15 additional cities in 2021. Eventually, Amazon plans to deploy at least 100,000 electric vans — the size of its order with Rivian — over the next several years.
Amazon and Rivian began testing vehicles four months prior to making customer deliveries, as part of the testing and development process. Amazon is also starting to modify its buildings to accommodate the new fleet of vehicles and has installed thousands of electric vehicle charging stations at its delivery stations across North America and Europe, the company said.
“We’re loving the enthusiasm from customers so far–from the photos we see online to the car fans who stop our drivers for a first-hand look at the vehicle,” Ross Rachey, director of Amazon’s global Fleet and products, said in a statement. “From what we’ve seen, this is one of the fastest modern commercial electrification programs, and we’re incredibly proud of that.”
The exterior of Rivian-built electric vans share some the same design features found in today’s gas-powered versions. There are a few more rounded edges and an overall sleeker look to the electric vans.
The real difference is in the electric architecture and the custom features that have been integrated into the vans, including, highway driving and traffic assist features; exterior cameras that can provide a 360-degree view for the driver via a digital display, a larger interior floor space in the cabin to help with drivers getting to and from the cabin compartment, surround tail lights for better braking visibility and three-level shelving and a bulkhead cargo compartment separating door. Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is also an embedded feature.
