& meet dozens of singles today!
User blogs
In June of 1999, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins invested $25 million into an early stage company developing a new search engine called Google, paving the way for a revolution in how knowledge online was organized and shared.
Now, Sequoia Capital is placing another bet on a different kind of search engine, one for physical objects in three dimensions, just as the introduction of three dimensional sensing technologies on consumer phones are poised to create a revolution in spatial computing.
At least, that’s the bet that Sequoia Capital’s Shaun Maguire is making on the Cincinnati, Ohio-based startup Physna.
Maguire and Sequoia are leading a $20 million bet into the company alongside Drive Capital, the Columbus, Ohio-based venture firm founded by two former Sequoia partners, Mark Kvamme and Chris Olsen.
“There’s been this open problem in mathematics, which is how you do three dimensional search. How do you define a metric that gives you other similar three dimensional objects. This has a long history in mathematics,” Maguire said. “When I first met [Physna founder] Paul Powers, he had already come up with a wildly novel distance metric to compare different three dimensional objects. If you have one distance metric, you can find other objects that are a distance away. His thinking underlying that is so unbelievably creative. If I were to put it in the language of modern mathematics… it just involves a lot of really advanced ideas that actually also works.”
Powers’ idea — and Physna’s technology — was a long time coming.
A lawyer by training and an entrepreneur at heart, Powers came to the problem of three dimensional search through his old day job as an intellectual property lawyer.
Powers chose IP law because he thought it was the most interesting way to operate at the intersection of technology and law — and would provide good grounding for whatever company the serial entrepreneur would eventually launch next. While practicing, Powers hit upon a big problem, while some intellectual property theft around software and services was easy to catch, it was harder to identify when actual products or parts were being stolen as trade secrets. “We were always able to find 2D intellectual property theft,” Powers said, but catching IP theft in three dimensions was elusive.
From its launch in 2015 through 2019, Powers worked with co-founder and chief technology officer Glenn Warner Jr. on developing the product, which was initially intended to protect product designs from theft. Tragically just as the company was getting ready to unveil its transformation into the three dimensional search engine it had become, Warner died.
Powers soldiered on, rebuilding the company and its executive team with the help of Dennis DeMeyere, who joined the company in 2020 after a stint in Google’s office of the chief technology officer and technical director for Google Cloud.
“When I moved, I jumped on a plane with two checked bags and moved into a hotel, until I could rent a fully furnished home,” DeMeyere told Protocol last year.
Other heavy hitters were also drawn to the Cincinnati-based company thanks in no small part to Olsen and Kvamme’s Silicon Valley connections. They include Github’s chief technology officer, Jason Warner, who has a seat on the company’s board of directors alongside Drive Capital’s co-founder Kvamme, who serves as the chairman.
In Physna, Kvamme, Maguire, and Warner see a combination of Github and Google — especially after the launch last year of the company’s consumer facing site, Thangs.
That site allows users to search for three dimensional objects by a description or by uploading a model or image. As Mike Murphy at Protocol noted, it’s a bit like Thingiverse, Yeggi or other sites used by 3D-printing hobbyists. What the site can also do is show users the collaborative history of each model and the model’s component parts — if it involves different objects.
Hence the GitHub and Google combination. And users can set up profiles to store their own models or collaborate and comment on public models.
What caught Maguire’s eye about the company was the way users were gravitating to the free site. “There were tens of thousands of people using it every day,” he said. It’s a replica of the way many successful companies try a freemium or professional consumer hybrid approach to selling products. “They have a free version and people are using it all the time and loving it. That is a foundation that they can build from,” said Maguire.
And Maguire thinks that the spatial computing wave is coming sooner than anyone may realize. “The new iPhone has LIDAR on it… This is the first consumer device that comes shipped with a 3D scanner with LIDAR and I think three dimensional is about to explode.”
Eventually, Physna could be a technology hub where users can scan three dimensional objects into their phones and have a representational model for reproduction either as a virtual object or as something that can be converted into a file for 3D printing.
Right now, hundreds of businesses have approached the company with different requests for how to apply its technology, according to Powers.
“One new feature will allow you to take a picture of something and not only show you what that is or where it goes. Even if that is into a part of the assembly. We shatter a vase and with the vase shards we can show you how the pieces fit back together,” Powers said.
Typical contracts for the company’s software range from $25,000 to $50,000 for enterprise customers, but the software that powers Physna’s product is more than just a single application, according to Powers.
“We’re not just a product. We’re a fundamental technology,” said Powers. “There is a gap between the physical and the digital.”
For Sequoia and Drive Capital, Physna’s software is the technology to bridge that gap.
Billions of devices are currently connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), and researchers are predicting tremendous growth in the coming decade.
One of the most exciting, challenging and potentially lucrative areas of the IoT is the automotive sector. The car is a major component of most people’s daily lives, and a “smart” car could do a lot to save people time and money.
At the same time, the “Internet of Cars” carries with it dystopian visions of increased ad noise and security threats. It’s worth considering for a moment what these scenarios look like — good and bad — and how consumers can educate themselves to ensure that the cars of the future are driving in the right direction.
The car is a major component of most people’s daily lives, and a “smart” car could do a lot to save people time and money.
The promises and problems of connected cars
Imagine if your car was able to call your mechanic when the engine was showing signs of trouble. Imagine if the mechanic could read a data report from your engine and order the required parts ahead of time. Imagine if the data on those parts could be aggregated to warn of the need for any mass recalls? What if your car could communicate with other cars around it in a traffic jam, and the cars could all work together to space out and ease congestion?
What if your car could pay automatically at parking garages and drive-throughs? Anyone that owns a car is familiar with all these pain points, and the prospect of a new system that erases these spots of friction would be a welcome development.
But how can we ensure that all of this new data from our smart cars will be handled in a secure and private way? It seems likely, as car manufacturers work quickly to bring their products online, that tech giants will be the first partners to help implement the Internet of Cars. This might be cause for concern amongst consumers who are growing tired of their data being sold or hacked. The big tech companies aren’t inherently evil, but their basic business models are structured in such a way that consumer privacy and security are not the main priorities.
It’s not hard to imagine how the Internet of Cars could move in a much darker direction: Advertisements with real-time location data updating constantly on your windshield, personal data such as your driving habits stored on central servers, and a myriad of new vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit. How do we bring cars online so that friction in our lives is smoothed down without introducing a unique set of new problems?
Data security must be the foundation of the IoC
Of course Big Tech companies will be eager to offer connectivity for drivers, but it’s most likely going to come at the price of giving personal data over to Big Tech servers. This brings with it, as always, two major problems. The first is that centralized data represents a honeypot for hackers. No matter the strength of the security system, hackers realize that once they break through, they have access to the whole pot. The second problem is that the value of all that data is simply too lucrative for the owner to ignore. The data will always be sold, regardless of all the lip service promising to make it anonymous.
The IoT represents a new layer of IT integration in our lives; it will be at least as much of a game-changer as the internet was originally. Even with the advancement of the mobile internet brought about by smartphones, internet implementations have, until now, basically been carried out through clunky interfaces like screens, keyboards and mouses. The IoT is going to bring a new level of sophistication to how and where we interface online, but this also means a new level of intrusion into our physical reality. In the case of cars, we can be rightly wary that this new development might be problematic, but it doesn’t have to be.
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) represents a path forward for the Internet of Cars, because it builds data security and privacy into the foundations of any connected devices. Any model of DLT includes some basic concepts such that data is carried on a decentralized network of computers and servers. It also means that data is stored permanently, and that new entries of any data are subject to a mathematical verification. DLT is a fundamentally different way to handle massive amounts of data. DLTs have proven to be extremely resilient to attacks, and the data on these networks is nearly impossible to collect and sell.
Picking the right tool for the job
There are millions of internet-connected cars already on the road, albeit mostly with crude subscription services for music and weather apps. With further advances, connection will be much more encompassing, with the average connected car having up to 200 sensors installed, each recording a point of data, minute by minute. The numbers quickly become staggering, and in emergency situations, the need for data agility is apparent. Picture driving on a highway in medium traffic.
If someone’s tire blows out half a mile ahead, this information could be quickly conveyed to surrounding cars, warning of the potential for emergency braking. Any DLT solution would have to include a very nimble verification process for all these new packets of information to be brought into and carried by the network.
Additionally, because of the computational complexity involved, almost all DLTs today charge a fee for each new transaction brought into the network. In fact, the fee is an integral part of the structure of many of these computational models. This is obviously not going to be workable in a system like urban traffic that would be generating billions of “transactions” every day. The truth is that decentralized data networks were never designed to handle these kinds of massive use-case scenarios. Blockchain, for example, is very elegant at censorship-resistance in a network, and this has proven valuable in certain financial use cases.
But a DLT that expects a little money every time a car’s air conditioning reports its output is simply unusable for that application. Any DLT that’s going to give us a high level of security and real-time connectivity will also have to be feeless.
Security, speed and ease of adaptability through a no-fee structure are the three critical points for any network backing up the Internet of Cars. DLTs are clearly the most secure option, but they must also provide scalability and a feeless structure.
The example of being able to pay automatically for a parking garage visit might seem like a trite convenience. In actuality, if we can implement these types of small transactions properly from the beginning, then the hurdles we will jump in solving the complexity and volume of the car traffic data environment will go a long way to creating a safe, consumer-friendly Internet of Things in general.
When thinking about a completely connected physical environment, the alternatives to scalable, fee-less DLT are frankly scary.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/29/internet-of-cars-a-driver-side-primer-on-iot-implementation/
Rocket fuel technology startup Firehawk Aerospace has added $1.2 million to its existing seed financing, bringing the full amount invested in the round to $2.5 million. The new tranche comes from Harlow Capital Management, a Dallas-based firm run by Colby Harlow, who will join Firehawk’s board of directors as part of the deal.
Firewhawk, which was a finalist in our first-ever all-virtual Startup Battlefield at TC Disrupt last September, has developed a new kind of hybrid rocket fuel that greatly enhances rocket launch safety, cost and transportation using additive manufacturing (basically, the grown-up version of 3D printing). Hybrid rocket fuel (which combines aspects of both liquid and solid propellants used previously) isn’t new, but past technology has been unable to compete on cost and efficacy relative to existing nonhybrid alternatives.
The startup’s Chief Scientist Ron Jones was able to get around these limitations with two new approaches: Using a fuel with a hard polymer structure and producing it using additive manufacturing instead of casting via molds with a liquid that hardens.
Firehawk now intends to use its seed funding to test its technology in operational conditions and at the kind of scale required for commercialization, and to build out its partnerships and client list. The startup also intends to grow its R&D and manufacturing operations in both Texas and Oklahoma.
Each year Okta processes millions of SaaS logons via its authentication system. It kindly aggregates that data to find the most popular apps and publishes an annual report. This year it found that the most popular tool by far was Microsoft Office 365.
It’s worth noting that while app usage popularity varied by region, Office 365 was number one with a bullet across the board, whether globally or when the report broke it down by geographic area. That wasn’t true of any other product in this report, so Office 365 has extensive usage across the world (at least among companies that use Okta).
But as with everything cloud, it’s not a simple matter to say that because lots of people signed onto Office 365, Microsoft is the clear winner in a broader sense. In reality, the cloud is a complex marketplace, and just because people use one tool doesn’t preclude them from using tools that compete directly with it.
As a case in point, consider that the report found that 36% of Microsoft 365 customers were also using Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite), which offers a similar set of office productivity tools. Further, Okta found that 42% of Office 365 customers were using Zoom and 32% were using Slack.
This is pretty remarkable when you consider that Office 365 bundles Teams with similar functionality for free. What’s more, so does Google with Google Hangouts, so people use the tool they want when they want, and sometimes it seems they use competing versions of the same tool. The report also found that of those Office 365 users, 44% are using Salesforce, 41% AWS, 15% Smartsheet and 14% Tableau (which is owned by Salesforce). Microsoft has products in all those categories.
Microsoft is clearly a big company with a lot of products, but the report blows a hole in the idea that because people like Office 365, they are going to be big fans of other Microsoft products, or that they can count on any kind of brand loyalty across the range of products or even exclusivity within the same product category.
All of this, and much of the other data in this report makes tremendously interesting reading as far as it goes. It’s not a definitive window on the state of SaaS. It’s a definitive reading on the state of Okta customers’ use of SaaS, on the Okta Integration Network (OIN), a point the company readily acknowledges in the report’s methodology section.
“As you read this report, keep in mind that this data is representative of Okta’s customers, the applications and integrations we connect to through the OIN, and the ways in which users access these tools through our service,” the report stated.
But it is a way to look at the state of SaaS taking advantage of the 9400 Okta customers using the network and the 6500 integrations to the world’s most popular SaaS tools. That gives the company a unique view into the world of SaaS. What you can conclude is that the cloud is complicated, and it’s not a zero sum game by any means. In fact, being a winner in one area is not a guarantee of winning across the board.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/29/okta-saas-report-finds-office-365-wins-the-cloud-sort-of/
As a turbulent week in the capital world, we’re taking a look at something a bit slower moving: venture capital trends in Africa during 2020.
The Exchange has long explored quarterly and yearly data regarding the North American, European and Asian venture capital markets, along with data on particular startup categories. From today, we’ll also provide regular examinations of what’s happening in Africa.
As an aside, we’re sorry The Exchange didn’t come out yesterday. The world went mad and we had to tend to breaking news. We’re back!
To dig into African venture capital results, we’re looking at a report concerning 2020 data from Briter Bridges, a research group that focuses on the continent’s private capital market. The Exchange also interviewed report author and Briter director Dario Giuliani about the collected data.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
What emerges is a generally growing venture capital scene, but one that had mixed results in 2020 compared to 2019. However, if we control for an outsized investment or two, things smooth out rather nicely.
Let’s check the top-line figures, get insight from Giuliani concerning where the capital is flowing most rapidly, and wrap with a look at which startup categories are seeing the most investment in Africa today.
Africa’s 2020 venture capital results
During my time at Crunchbase News, I helped lead a team that generated acre-feet of reporting on the global and domestic venture capital markets. It’s difficult work that involves making decisions on what counts, what doesn’t and how to handle rounds that have not been disclosed publicly.
Over time, I’ve also become comfortable with venture data from PitchBook and CB Insights as well, and am now adding the Briter dataset to the trusted cohort.
During my chat with Giuliani, it became clear that his team is doing the hard and valuable work of carefully collating and sorting information. I say all of that simply to let you know that we now have a regular source for trustworthy information (compiled in concert with seventy different investing groups) on Africa that we’ll use regularly to keep tabs on the continent. This is a win.
So, what does the data say? We have to parse it some, as historically Briter has collated megadeals — which it counts as investments of $90 million or more — and M&A in the same bucket. So, tracking just the dollar volume of African deals smaller than $90 million gives us the following set of results:
