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You’d be forgiven for being underwhelmed by the output from SoftBank Robotics thus far. The firm’s best-known product to date is almost certainly Pepper, a humanoid robot designed for greeting and signage that grew out of it 2015 acquisition of French robotics company, Aldebaran.

There’s also the matter of the investment firm’s acquisition and eventual sale of Boston Dynamics. The deal certainly went a ways toward accelerating the company’s go-to-market approach, but Boston Dynamics changed hands fairly quickly, when it was sold to Hyundai late last year (SoftBank maintains 20%).

The latest wrinkle in SoftBank’s robotic ambitions is nothing if not interesting. The firm announced today that it is joining forces with Iris Ohyama. The Japanese brand, which will hold a 51% stake in the venture (with SoftBank controlling the remainder), is best known for its home goods. The company makes a broad range of products, that includes, as Reuters put it, “everything from rice to rice cookers.”

You’ll be able to add robotics to that list, soon enough. The newly formed Iris Robotics has set an extremely aggressive goal of $965 million in sales by 2025. In a joint press release, the company noted Covid-19-related concerns as a major catalyst in the launch of the division. Certainly that makes strategic sense. There’s little question that the past year has kickstarted serious interest in robotics and automation.

The first couple of products from the venture don’t appear especially ambitious out of the gate, however. To start, it seems they’ll be rolling out “Iris Editions” of a pair of existing devices: Bear Robotics’ restaurant robot Servi and cleaning robot, Whiz.

Here’s a quote from SoftBank Robotics CEO (forgive the Google translate),

With the urgent need to realize the new normal in the corona virus, various new expectations are being placed on robots. This strong partnership with Iris Ohyama is a huge step forward for the expansion and penetration of robot solutions. Taking full advantage of the strengths of both companies, we will respond quickly to the challenges facing society.

Certainly the technical ambitions seem more modest than what the folks at companies like Boston Dynamics are currently working on, but Iris Ohyama seems well positioned to make some headway in the home robotics category to start.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/27/softbank-teams-with-home-goods-maker-iris-ohyama-for-new-robotics-venture/

In 2020, nearly $24 billion in venture capital poured into companies creating new technology products or innovative business models for the real estate market.

While things like smart home apps and digital mortgage financing services make life easier for upmarket renters and homeowners, none of these technologies help improve the day-to-day struggles of the vast majority of low-income families.

Many of these emergent technologies could be adapted to become “housing tech” solutions — focused on financial resilience, fresh food access, healthcare access and workforce development — which have the potential to transform the lives of our most at-risk populations.

Consider this: Nearly eight million Americans have slipped into poverty since May, according to a study released by Columbia University. Before the COVID-19 crisis hit, approximately half of all American households struggled to pay rent; a problem that is growing larger by the day as pandemic job losses continue to mount.

About 23.5 million people — half of whom are low income — live in food deserts where access to affordable, healthy food is limited or nonexistent. And good health care is almost impossible to access, let alone pay for, if you are poor.

As the global crisis continues to lay bare the deep inequities in our society, it’s clear that we need new ways of thinking to address these systemic issues. Investment in technology innovation in the affordable housing area could help solve these problems.

Local governments and nonprofits are doing what they can. In 2015, New York launched Urbantech NYC to uncover new technology solutions to urbanization problems faced by government, businesses and urban residents, tackling issues related to food, water, medicine, waste management and other problems.

In 2019, Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit, partnered with MetaProp, a leading proptech venture capital firm, to invest in housing tech companies that are developing technology innovations to help families find an affordable place to live.

These efforts are commendable, but it is not enough. The housing tech movement needs more champions.

First, we need a more patient venture capital source, with a better understanding of underserved communities. Most venture capital firms fund what they know, and unfortunately few understand the affordable housing community, which is largely minority with female heads of household. But pay attention: There are lucrative opportunities here.

Affordable housing property managers tend to invest far more in social services for their tenant population than market rate property managers considering the coolest new piece of technology. You can make money while serving the public good.

Second, housing tech is in desperate need of an accelerator. The tech is out there, but most entrepreneurs don’t know how to “sell” to this specific customer base, which they must do if they want to create viable businesses that will attract venture capital. There are numerous existing technologies ready for an accelerator to take to the next level. These are a few of our favorites:

• Financial Resilience. Low-income people who live in affordable housing are often burdened with confiscatory payday loans and check-cashing services. Many don’t have banking relationships and pay rent in cash. The Lifesaver app helps households, especially those without banking relationships, navigate financial services and become more financially resilient. Earnin allows people to access their pay, with no fees, as soon as they work the hours without waiting for the payday to arrive. Research shows that people who take these short-term loans from nonpredatory lenders actually find themselves more financially stable in following months.
• Fresh Food Access. Cheetah, a wholesale grocery delivery app, has placed community fridges as fresh-food pantries. Via, a transit-on-demand provider, partnered with LA Metro and First 5 LA to subsidize food delivery during the pandemic, especially to women-led households with little children.
• Healthcare Access. Roundtrip provides booking for affordable nonemergency hailed rides, wheelchair vans and other specialized medical transports. Healthify offers a database of vetted and curated community resources, as well as information about the social determinants of health. Emerging software apps that facilitate telemedicine could also expand access to necessary health care.
• Workforce Development. Skilling America is a new workforce platform from Goodwill that improves placement, retention and promotion rates, and most people using the platform are doing so on their smartphones.

An accelerator could also connect housing tech to affordable housing owners and property managers looking for ways to magnify the impact of the social services available on site. The top 50 owners of affordable housing developments have the reach to connect tech developers with almost a million households.

These owners and property managers could act as leadership ambassadors of collaborative efforts among tech developers, venture capital investors and potential housing tech users.

We work every day with the inspiring stakeholders in the affordable housing community, as well as local governments and tech entrepreneurs looking to bridge this digital divide. This isn’t a pie- in-the-sky vision. The future is here and the call to action is now.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/27/vc-investment-in-proptech-can-yield-profits-and-change-lives/

Rumors have been flying this week that SAP was going to buy Berlin business process automation startup Signavio, and sure enough the company made it official today. The companies did not reveal the purchase price, but Bloomberg reported earlier this week that the deal could be worth $1.2 billion.

With Signavio SAP gets a cloud native business process management tool. SAP CFO Luka Mucic sees a world where understanding and automating businesses processes has become a key part of a company’s digital transformation efforts.

“I cannot overstress the importance for companies to be able to design, benchmark, improve and transform business processes across the enterprise to support new capabilities and business models,” he said in a statement.

While traditional enterprise BPA tools have existed for years, having a cloud native tool gives SAP a much more modern approach to attacking this problem, and being able to automate business processes via the cloud has become more important during the pandemic when many many employees are working entirely from home.

SAP also sees Signavio as a key missing piece in the company’s Business Process Intelligence unit. “The combination of business process intelligence from SAP and Signavio creates a leading end-to-end business process transformation suite to help our customers achieve the requirements needed to gain a competitive edge,” he said.

SAP has been making moves into process automation of late. In fact at SAP TechEd in December, the company announced SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, its foray into the RPA space. This should fit in nicely alongside it.

Dr. Gero Decker, Savigno co-founder and CEO, sees SAP resources helping push the company beyond what it could have done on its own. “Considering the positioning of SAP, its geographical coverage and financial muscle, SAP is the biggest and best platform to bring process intelligence to every organization,” he said in a statement.

The increased resources and reach argument is one that just about every acquired company CEO makes, but being pulled into a company the size of SAP can be a double-edged sword. Yes, it has vast resources, but it also can be hard for an acquired company to find its place in such a large pond. How well they fit in and make that transition from startup to big company cog, will go a long way in determining the success of this transaction in the long run.

Signavio launched in 2009 in Berlin and has raised almost $230 million, according to Crunchbase data. Investors include Apax Digital and Summit Partners. The most recent investment was July 2019 Series C for $177 million, which came in at a $400 million valuation.

Customers include Comcast, Bosch, Liberty Mutual, and yes SAP. Perhaps it will be getting a discount now.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/27/sap-is-buying-berlin-business-process-automation-startup-signavio/

Cryptocurrencies, more so than most other things, are only valuable because of a shared agreement that they are valuable. Their value is a product of digital handshakes over millions of transactions firming up that consensus. For bitcoin, the trust that it has worth has turned more valuable in the past several months; it’s been on a tear.

The (very bizarre) question is whether a new avenue of applying blind trust by brigading trashcan-level stocks and turning them into memes could threaten the appeal of cryptocurrencies for retail investors.

Over the past several days, we’ve seen stocks ranging from GameStop, Blockbuster and AMC make unjustifiable gains as a result of Reddit users in the r/WallStreetBets subreddit triggering a stampede towards stocks being heavily shorted by institutional investors. That in turn has led to a short squeeze troubling hedge funds, causing the price of a stock worth around $5 for the majority of 2020 to swell well above $300 today. In some ways it’s just an Occupy Wall Street protest being held on Robinhood, in other ways it’s a complete rejection of efficient markets and a reinvention of institutional trust.

Bitcoin holds fundamental differences from publicly traded stocks, many of which might matter an awful lot to those betting on the coin as a currency of the future. But to retail investors who aren’t hardcore proponents, I’d imagine FOMO was one of the most intriguing pulls into the cryptocurrency space. But if Bitcoin’s purpose for the time being is merely a “store of value,” I think there’s a world where individual investors might be evolving their interests elsewhere.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies haven’t seen notable price movement in recent days  — Bitcoin is down around 6% in the past 24 hours, a hiccup as far as crypto moves go — but after a few weeks hovering well above $30k and peeking above $40k, the currency seems poised to dip below the $30k range soon unless its trend reverses course.

All that said, Bitcoin is certainly an entity of a different scale than all of these meme stocks bundled together with a market cap above $560 billion and a 24-hour trading volume of $56 billion. Bitcoin has seen stratospheric growth over the past few months so barring an outsized crash, it’s perhaps unlikely that retail investors are going to fully abandon it in favor of buying up crusty old shares of Blockbuster stock. That said…

It’s cheaper to trade these meme stocks and easier for retail investors to get leverage via options. In short, for investors looking to have a good time or shoot the moon, meme stock are a more fun place to be than crypto is.

The main thing to consider is what happens if GameStop, for no reason at all, becomes a long-term store of value? When investors collectively begin placing blind trust in more financial assets for the long-haul, does that devalue blind trust itself and the mammoth entities that had more of a monopoly on it? Most investors aren’t expecting this to happen, but stocks like Tesla are beginning to live comfortably at ridiculous premiums that analysts can’t understand. Tesla and GameStop are very different beasts, but if anything I think institutions have a better grasp of GameStop’s rise.

The foil to all of this is whether this pandemonium births some regulatory backlash, a possibility which of course does not exist in quite the same way for cryptocurrencies from a central governance standpoint. TD Ameritrade and Schwab are already limiting trades of some of these meme stocks tday and I think there is certainly a universe in which the SEC aims to take a pot shot at this saga by means of promoting market sanity and I am much more confident that there’s a world where Reddit is pushed to at least temporarily ban r/WallStreetBets for some unclear reason.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/27/could-meme-stocks-like-gamestop-kill-bitcoins-rise/

A little less than two years ago, when the actor, producer, and investor Robert Downey Jr. unveiled his new, sustainability focused initiative called the FootPrint Coalition at Amazon’s re:MARS conference it was little more than a static website and a subscription prompt.

Jump cut to today, and the firm now has five portfolio companies, a non-profit initiative, and is launching a rolling venture fund, Footprint Coalition Ventures, at the World Economic Forum’s Digital Davos event.

With the new rolling fund, managed through AngelList, Downey Jr.’s initiative sits the intersection of two of the biggest ideas reshaping the world economy — the democratization of access to capital and investment vehicles and the $10 trillion opportunity to decarbonize global industry.

It’s another arrow in the quiver for an institution that aims to combine storytelling, investing, and non-profit commitments to combat the world’s climate crisis.

Rolling funds and the revolution in finance

There’s a revolution happening in finance right now, whether it’s the rise of the Redittors trying to avenge the malfeasance of short-sellers and big institutional investors that’s happening through investments in stocks like Blockbuster, Nokia, Gamestop and AMC, or the new crowdfunding sources and rolling funds that are allowing regular investors to finance early stage companies, things on Wall Street are definitely changing.

And while the public market gambles are undoubtably minting some new millionaires, opening up access to interesting startup investments is a thesis that’s a stark contrast to the cynicism of day-trading gambles.

Both could leave investors with less than zero in some cases, but with rolling funds or crowdfunding, there’s a real opportunity to build something rather than just sticking it to the man.

Unlike traditional venture funds, rolling funds raise new capital commitments on a quarterly basis and invest as they go, hence the “rolling”. Investors come on for a minimum one-year commitment, and invest at a quarterly cadence. In Downey Jr.’s fund that commitment amounts to $5,000 per quarter for up to 2,000 qualified investors (and a smaller number of accredited ones), according to a person with knowledge of the firm’s plans.

“The idea of opening [the fund] to real people, rather than the ivory tower of the institutional bigwigs… It’s a little bit more slamdance than Sundance [and] I kind of dig it,” said Downey Jr.

A guide to recognizing FootPrint Coalition Ventures

FootPrint Coalition Ventures will be split between early and late stage investment funds and will be looking to make six investments per year in early stage companies and four later stage deals.

Helping Downey Jr. manage the operations are investors like Jonathan Schulthof, who previously founded LOOM Media, which leverages smart urban infrastructure for advertising, founded Motivate International, which manages bike sharing services in cities across the U.S., and served as a managing partner for Global Technology Investments. Schulthof is joined by Steve Levin, who co-founded Team Downey, Downey Jr.’s media production company and Downey Ventures, which invests in media and technology companies. 

The firm already has four companies in its portfolio through investments it made using the founders’ own capital. And while those investments were all under $1 million, the firm expects that the size of its commitments will grow as it raises additional cash. Footprint Coalition has also maintained pro-rata investment rights so that it can increase the size of its stake in businesses over time. And the investments it made to date were sized in anticipation of potential for follow-ons at much higher valuations.

A venture fund inside of a coalition

The initiative that Downey Jr. hopes to build is more than just an investment arm. Both he and his co-founders see the investment side as a single piece of a broader platform that leverages the massive social following Downey Jr. has created and the storytelling skills he and his team have mastered through decades spent working in the movie business.

That broader team includes Rachel Kropa, the former head of the CAA Foundation, who will lead scientific and philanthropic efforts and serve as the fund’s Impact Advisor and liaison to the scientific and research communities, according to a statement.

Rachel Kropa, former head of the CAA Foundation who joined Footprint Coalition to lead scientific and philanthropic efforts last year, will serve as the fund’s Impact Advisor and liaison to the scientific and research communities.

“The idea that the content that we made can be related back to the individual is very powerful,” said Kropa. “This problem is so intractable and interconnected across the world. It does matter that the fish that you eat are made using a sustainable feed.”

Kropa is referring to a piece that the FootPrint Coalition put out around sustainable aquaculture tied to the group’s recent investment in Ÿnsect, a company that makes protein from crickets for use in animal feed and human food.

“Our content around Cellular Agriculture, exemplifies the type of content we can create in the course of taking a deep dive into a particular industry. Though we have not (yet) invested in the space, we do believe there are interesting stories to tell,” said one person who works with the company.

That media is additive to activate the group’s audience, and is not something that it charges for — or considers part of its investment valuation. “We’ve been creating edited video segments with Robert doing voice over and overlaying animation all of which we’ve been posting to social. We do this for free to the companies, and we don’t charge / strong-arm / cajole for warrants, advisor shares, or the like in return,” the person said.

Weird science and sustainability

While Ÿnsect is one example of a company that the FootPrint Coalition has backed that’s doing something which may be a little outside of the purview of most of Downey Jr.’s following, other businesses like the bamboo toilet paper company, Cloud Paper, and the new investment in the sustainability focused financial services company, Aspiration, have definite direct consumer ties.

That balance is something that Schulthof said the firm was looking for as it pursues not just environmental and sustainability returns, but, more concretely, profit.

“We look at things that are meaningful and impactful [and] I get to be purely capitalist. The question is this a good opportunity is something that has to do with its margins, its scale, its risk profile, the people involved and fundamentally what are the terms… do we think the company will deliver value to investors,” said Schulthof. “We’re looking for returns.”

The opportunity for returns is enormous. As the group noted, the ESG sector – funds that focus on the Environmental, Social and Governance issues – continues to grow rapidly Part of the broader stakeholder capitalism movement, impact investing funds have topped $250 billion, and sustainability assets have doubled in value over the past three years.

“We see two powerful trends working together to support the environment. First, engaging content and media distribution enable us to create a passionate community from Robert’s 100 million followers and to use that audience to access great investments. Second, a turnkey technology platform now enables us to manage a broad set of individual investors,” said Schulthof in a statement. “Venture funds traditionally have high minimums that exclude only the wealthiest individuals, or endowments and foundations. With much lower minimums and shorter investment periods, we can now offer access to these same companies to a much broader group. When these investors further ignite our passionate audience, we hope to set a positive feedback loop in motion with environmental technologies as the ultimate beneficiary.”

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/27/robert-downey-jr-is-launching-a-new-rolling-venture-fund-to-back-sustainability-startups/