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It’s plain to see that electric vehicles are the future, but there’s more to making that change happen than swapping out a gas motor for a battery-powered one — especially in aircraft. H3X is a startup that aims to accelerate that future with a reimagined, completely integrated electric motor that it claims outperforms everything on the market.

The small founding team — CEO Jason Sylvestre, CTO Max Liben, and COO Eric Maciolek — met in college while participating in an electric vehicle building and racing program. After stints in the tech and automobile industry (including at Tesla), the crew came back together when they saw that the Department of Energy was offering a bounty for improved high power density electric motors.

“The problem was uniquely suited to our abilities, and passions too — we’re excited about this stuff. We care about decarbonization of the different transit sectors, and aviation is going to become a growing part of the global carbon footprint over the next few decades as electric improves ground vehicles,” said Liben. “We just kinda decided to take a leap of faith, and applied to Y Combinator.”

Electric flight isn’t so much a wild idea as one that’s in its early, awkward stages. Lightweight craft like drones can do a great deal with the batteries and motors that are available, and converted small aircraft like seaplanes are able to make short flights, but that’s about the limit with the way things are today.

The problem is primarily a simple lack of power: the energy required to propel an aircraft fast enough to generate lift grows exponentially as the size and mass of the plane increase. A handful of kilowatt-hours will serve for a drone, and a few EV-scale batteries will work for a light aircraft… but beyond that the energy required to take flight requires batteries the bulk and weight of which make flight impractical.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be like that. And there are two general avenues for improvement: better batteries or better motors. So either you can fit more energy in the same mass or use what energy you have more efficiently. Both are being pursued by many companies, but H3X claims to have made a huge leap forward in power density that could unlock new industries overnight. While even an improvement of 10 or 20 percent in power per kilogram (e.g. a 50-pound motor putting out 120 horsepower rather than 100) would be notable, H3X says its motor is performing at around 300 percent of the competition’s output.

How? It’s all about integration, Liben explained. While the pieces are similar in some ways to motors and power assemblies out there now, the team basically started from scratch with the idea of maximizing efficiency and minimizing size.

Electric motors generally have three main sections: the motor itself, a power delivery system, and a gearbox, each of which may have its own housing and be sold and mounted separately from one another. One reason why these aren’t all one big machine is temperature: the parts and coolant systems of the gearbox, for instance, might not be able to operate at the temperatures generated by the motor or the power system, or vice versa. Put them together and one may cause the other to seize up or otherwise fail. The different sections just have different requirements, which seems natural.

Image Credits: H3X

H3X challenges this paradigm with a novel integrated design, but Liben was careful to clarify what that means.

“We’re not just taking the inverter box and slapping it on top and calling it integrated,” he said. “All the components are all intimately connected to the same housing and motor. We’re making a truly integrated design that’s one of the first of its kind at this power level.”

And by “one of the first” he doesn’t mean that Airbus has one in some powertrains, but rather that there have been research projects along these lines — nothing intended for production.

The idea that no one else has gone this far in putting everything in the same box at scales that could be used commercially may sound suspicious to some. One would think that the existing players in aerospace would have been barking up this tree for years, but Liben said large companies are too slow to innovate and too invested in other methods, while smaller ones tend to avoid risk by improving incrementally on successful existing designs and competing among themselves. “No one is targeting the level of performance we’re looking at right now,” he said.

But it isn’t like H3X stumbled over a single advance that magically tripled the performance of electric motors.

“We’re not relying on one big tech or something — there’s no magic bullet,” Liben said. “There are a few improvements that have very significant gains, like 50 percent better than the state of the art, and lots of areas that add 10-20 percent. It’s good from the technical risk side.”

He went into considerable detail on a lot of those improvements, but the less technical-minded among our readers, if they’ve even read this far, might close the tab if I tried to recount the whole conversation. To be brief, it amounts to combining advances in materials, manufacturing, and electric components so that they act synergistically, each enabling the other to be used to best effect.

For instance, recently improved power switching hardware can be run at hotter temperatures and handle higher loads — this raises performance but also allows for shared cooling infrastructure. The shared infrastructure can itself be improved by using new pure-copper 3D printing techniques, which allow more cooling to fit inside the housing. Using 3D printing means custom internal geometries so that the motor, gearbox, and power delivery can all be mounted in optimal positions to one another instead of bolted on where existing methods allow.

The result is an all-in-one motor, the HPDM-250, that’s smaller than a lot of the competition, yet produces far more power. The best production motors out there are around 3-4 kilowatts per kilogram of continuous power. H3X’s prototype produces 13 — coincidentally, just above the theoretical power density that would enable mid-range passenger aircraft.

Image Credits: H3X

There is the risk that stacking cutting edge techniques like this makes the cost rise faster than the performance. Liben said that while it’s definitely more expensive in some ways, the smaller size and integrated design also lead to new savings in cost, time, or material.

“People think, ‘3D printing copper, that’s expensive!’ But when you compare it to the super high performance windings you’d need otherwise, and the different ways that you manufacture them, that can require a lot of manual steps and people involved… it can be a lot simpler printing something,” he explained. “It can be counterintuitive, but at least from my BOM [bill of materials] cost, when you’re selling something three times smaller than the other guy, even if it’s high performance materials, it’s actually not as expensive as you’d think. Based on the customers we’ve talked to so far, we think we’re in a good spot.”

Servicing a fully integrated motor is also fundamentally more complex than doing so for an off the shelf one, but Liben noted that they were careful to think about maintenance from the start — and also that, while it may be a little harder to service their motor than an ordinary electric one, it’s much, much simpler than servicing even the most reliable and well-known gas-powered motors.

Despite the huge gains H3X claims, the target market of passenger aircraft is hardly one that they, or anyone, can just jump into. Heavily regulated industries like air travel require years of work and technology proving to change a fastener style, let alone the method of propulsion.

So H3X is focusing on the numerous smaller, less regulated industries that could use vastly improved electric propulsion. Cargo drones, electric boats, and air taxis might still be rare sights on this planet, but a big bump to motor power and efficiency might be what helps tip them from niche (or vaporware) to mainstream. Certainly all three of those applications could benefit hugely from improved range or payload capacity.

Graduating to passenger flights isn’t a distant dream, exactly, suggested Liben: “We’re already on our way — this isn’t 20-years-out type stuff. In the last few years the timelines have shrunk drastically. You could have a full battery electric vehicle soon, but it isn’t going to cut it for longer flights.”

There’s still a role for motors like H3X’s in hybrid aircraft that use jet fuel, batteries, and perhaps even hydrogen fuel cells interchangeably. Like the switch to electric cars, it doesn’t happen all at once and it doesn’t need to for the purposes of their business. “That’s the great thing about motors,” Liben said. “They’re so ubiquitous.”

H3X declined to disclose any funding or partners, although it’s hard to believe that the team could have gotten as far as it has without some kind of significant capital and facilities — this sort of project outgrows the garage workbench pretty fast. But with Y Combinator’s demo day happening tomorrow, it seems likely that they’ll be receiving a lot of calls over the next few weeks, after which it may be reasonable to expect a seed round to come together.

If H3X’s prototypes perform as well in the wild as they do on the bench, they may very well enable a host of new electric transportation applications. We’ll be watching closely to see how the startup’s play affects the future of electric mobility.

Social audio app Clubhouse has now promised a time frame of sorts for the launch of its anticipated Android version, following its recent hire of an Android software developer last month. In its weekly Townhall event on Sunday, Clubhouse co-founder Paul Davison remarked that the company was working “really hard” to come to Android, but said it’s going to take a “couple of months” to make that happen. That seems to indicate a time frame that’s closer to late spring or summer 2021.

Clubhouse had previously said in a late January blog post that it would begin work on its Android version “soon,” but had not yet promised any sort of time frame as to when it would be able to bring that version to the public. Instead, most of its statements about Android have been vague mentions of the importance of supporting the Android user base and making its app more accessible to a wider audience.

In the meantime, Clubhouse’s biggest rival, Twitter Spaces, has been taking advantage of Clubhouse’s delay to address the sizable Android user base by rapidly rolling out support to more people across platforms. This month, for example, Twitter Spaces opened up to Android users, allowing anyone on Android to join and talk inside its live audio rooms. Shortly thereafter, Twitter said that it plans to publicly launch Twitter Spaces to the general public in April. That would be well ahead of Clubhouse, unless the latter rapidly speeds up development and drops its invite-only status in the weeks ahead.

During Sunday’s Clubhouse Townhall, co-founder Davison explained the company’s approach to scaling to a larger market — like one where Android users participate — as an effort that requires a slower pace, when it comes to opening up access to more users. He noted that when Clubhouse grows, the discovery experience inside the app can be negatively impacted as a result. Users today are seeing more foreign language groups in their feeds, for instance, and are having a harder time finding friends and some of the best content, he said.

To address these challenges, Clubhouse plans to make several changes, including tweaks to the app’s Activity feed, tools to give users more control over their push notifications, and the launch of more personalization features — like showing users a personalized list of suggested rooms that appear on screen when you first open the app. These sorts of improvements are necessary to make Clubhouse succeed even as it scales its app to a larger user base, the company believes.

That said, Davison also spoke of dropping Clubhouse’s invite-only status as something it hopes to do “in the coming months.” He noted that he wants the app to open up to everyone, because there are “so many incredible creators not yet on Clubhouse, who have an audience elsewhere.”

“It’s going to be really important that we just open up to everyone,” Davison said. “Android’s going to be really important. Localization is obviously going to be very important.” Plus, making Clubhouse more accessible was important, too, he said.

The lack of an Android version of Clubhouse has already caused some complications for the company.

A number of Android app developers have taken advantage of the hole left in the market to hawk their “Clubhouse guides,” which intentionally aim to confuse Android users looking for Clubhouse by using the same app icon. (Google apparently doesn’t bother to weed out low-value and/or infringing content like this from the Play Store.)

More recently, cybercriminals have gotten in on the action, too. They’ve created fake versions of Clubhouse that even pointed to a well-executed copy of the Clubhouse website in order to trick users into downloading their malicious app. One of these apps has been found to be spreading BlackRock malware, which steals users’ login credentials for over 450 services, including Facebook, Twitter and Amazon.

Davison addressed this issue during the Townhall, warning users that if they see anyone trying to impersonate Clubhouse on Android, not to use that app because “it could be harmful.”

“It is certainly not the real Clubhouse. Same thing with PC. There’s no PC app for Clubhouse,” he said, adding that a desktop version of Clubhouse is not a high priority for the company.

The company made a number of other announcements, as well, the most notable being its plans for more creator tools. These will be focused on helping creators grow their own audiences for their shows, and even monetize their events, if they choose, through things like direct payments, subscriptions, brand sponsorships, and even “paid events.” Clubhouse will also offer tools for managing memberships and tracking metrics around listeners and retention, but overall, details were light on what specific tools would be available or when they would roll out.

Clubhouse hasn’t responded to a request for further comment on the statements made during its Townhall event.

Amazon’s Prime Wardrobe has been a key way for the e-commerce giant to expand its reach selling clothing and other apparel: giving shoppers an easy way to try on several items, return what they don’t want, and pay for what they keep has helped it cross the virtual chasm by bringing the online experience a little closer to what it’s like to shop for fashion in physical stores. Now, a startup that’s built “Prime Wardrobe as a service” to help smaller competitors offer its shoppers the same experience is announcing some funding to expand its business.

TryNow — which provides technology to online retailers that use Shopify Plus to let their customers receive and try out apparel, return what they don’t want and pay only for what they keep — has raised $12 million, funding that it will be using to continue expanding its business.

The startup, based out of San Francisco, already works with around 50 up-and-coming online retailers doing between $10 million and $100 million in revenues, with Universal Standard, Roolee, Western Rise, and Solid & Striped among its customers. Founder and CEO Benjamin Davis said in an interview that it has seen business grow six-fold in the last year as more shopping has shifted online from brick-and-mortar due to the pandemic. TryNow claims that using its service can help brands grow average order value by 63%, conversion rates by 22% and return on ad spend by 76%.

Fashion has been a primary focus for “try before you buy” services online, but the the model is not limited to it.

“Apparel is a core category for us,” said Davis, but he also said he believes that the model can be applied to improve the unit economics of selling online to other categories, like cookware. “Prime Wardrobe has solidified the power of that model for fashion, but we believe it’s much larger. We think that any purchase that is discretionary should be tried before it is bought.”

The funding, a Series A, is coming from a very notable list of backers that speaks to the opportunity in this space. Investors in the round include Shine Capital, Craft Ventures, SciFi VC (the venture firm co-founded by Max Levchin, founder and CEO of buy-now-pay-later firm Affirm), Third Kind, and Plaid co-founders Zachary Perret and William Hockey.

As-a-service, at your service

TryNow sits as part of a bigger wave of commerce and finance services that have emerged over the years to provide technology to entrepreneurs where the commerce technology they are using is not the core of the business they are building.

The thinking goes: building payments or related features is complex and not something that a company not focused on payments would build itself (much like most businesses would not build their own accounting software, or the computers that they use). And as the biggest competitors — eg, Amazon — continue to grow and build their own technology in-house to keep their competitive edge, a demand for more tech-enabled tools only grows and becomes more sophisticated with the competitive threat. These in turn get delivered as a service, since smaller competitors will lack the funds and human capital to build these themselves.

Davis said that TryNow chose to work solely with Shopify (and specifically Shopify Plus, the version of the service with more features, designed for retailers with more than $1 million in revenues) and its platform for letting retailers build and operate e-commerce storefronts, because of how it has become such an integral player in that ecosystem.

He said that there has been demand from retailers using other platforms such as Big Commerce and Adobe’s Magento — as well as the platforms themselves. And it will look to expand to these over time, but for now, “we think Shopify is the most powerful, and growing the fastest, with the biggest opportunity at checkout,” said Davis. “It’s a multibillion opportunity.”

TryNow has whittled down its core functionality in the e-commerce space to a very specific role.

It doesn’t handle checkout — that’s Shopify; nor transactions — that’s payment companies, or indeed by-now-pay-later companies (like TryNow, another kind of tech helping people defray the payment part of procurement); nor returns — it integrates with Happy Returns, Loop Returns and Returnly; nor email-based communications and marketing with customers — that’s Klaviyo.

What TryNow provides are analytics to manage the risk around any deal, and technology to integrate and manage the payments and returns experience, so that procuring doesn’t trigger a payment, returning triggers a payment for what is kept, and I suppose not returning triggers a different kind of payment (plus flagging the customer for future try-now-pay-later attempts).

Within the wider space of e-commerce, apparel has had a particularly tricky ride among those trying to bring the experience into the online world.

It’s no surprise when you think about it: shopping for apparel is an inherently physical activity, involving trying things on, browsing around big stores with wide selections, and only paying for what you actually take away with you.

That has given rise to a lot of different startups, leaning on new innovations in computer vision and other areas of artificial intelligence, better cameras on phones, new manufacturing techniques and more to try to sew up the gap between what you do online and how you would shop in the brick-and-mortar world.

(And these startups are seeing their own opportunities and demand in the market: just last week, Snap Inc acquired Fit Analytics, one of the tech companies building better tools to improve how online shoppers can estimate what size they might need to buy of an item: the social media company’s interest is to use the technology to expand how it works with its advertisers and to build out a bigger shopping experience on Snapchat and beyond.)

Before try-now-pay-later, the basic idea of selling fashion online has been to assume it’s okay to skip all the physical aspects of buying apparel before paying.

“Give me a credit card, and I’ll charge you for what you are getting, and if you don’t like it, you can get a refund? We would never operate a brick-and-mortar store that way, charging people before going into fitting rooms,” said Davis. “It’s unnatural and restricts growth.” And high-ticket items can be even harder to sell in that environment, he added.

While companies like Le Tote, Stitch Fix, and Wantable have built out fashion businesses on the premise of try first, and then pay only for what you keep, there are fewer companies out there that have distilled this idea into a standalone, B2B service. (And indeed, the try-before-you-buy service can be a tricky one to manage as a viable business, with Le Tote, now in Chapter 11, and now-defund Lumoid pointing to some of the challenges.)

“Ben and the TryNow team are taking what they’ve learned from Affirm and Stitch Fix and launching the ultimate checkout option: try now, buy later. This translates into more order volume and more profit. We all want to try before we buy: it’s only a matter of time before TryNow’s checkout solution becomes the standard,” said Brian Murray, managing director at Craft Ventures, in a statement.

Still, there are others that compete more directly. BlackCart out of Canada, which raised funding earlier this year, also provides try-now-pay-later as a service for apparel and other goods, and it integrates with other storefront platforms beyond Shopify. (It seems to take a different approach to offsetting the risk for retailers, essentially making up-front payments for goods itself and then reconciling directly with the retails around returns.) And it seems like a no brainer that Amazon might try to offer Wardrobe as a service to more retailers, as it does with so many of its other features.

Along with the funding, TryNow is also announcing a couple of new executive appointments that speak to where it sees itself competing and sitting longer term. Jessica Baier, formerly of Stitch Fix, is now VP of growth strategy; and Jonathan Kayne, a former head of product partnerships for Affirm, is now TryNow’s VP of platform.

The investors in this round are a pretty interesting set of backers that also point to possible directions for the company.

Shine is a relatively new firm co-founded by Mo Koyfman and Josh Mohrer to focus on early stage investments, with Koyfman previously backing a lot of interesting e-commerce companies at Spark; Craft is another early stage firm co-founded by David Sacks and Bill Lee; SciFi VC is Max and Nellie Levchin’s venture fund (and Max has a long and impressive track record in e-commerce, most recently as the founder and CEO of another startup in the flexible payment space, buy-now-pay-later business Affirm).

Third Kind, meanwhile, has been a prolific backer of e-commerce tech as part of its bigger investment thesis. And while Plaid’s founders are investing here as financial backers, it’s notable that they are both providing financial features as a service to third party businesses: diversification for Plaid might one day come in the form of providing tools for specific verticals, which would likely take them into the realm of more flexible payment and procurement options.

“At Shine, we are attracted to businesses with simple yet powerful insights that can ultimately lead to massively scalable new platforms,” said Koyfman in a statement. “TryNow’s understanding that a lack of tactility restricts e-commerce growth has opened the opportunity to create and scale the Try Now Buy Later category. It is rare to find such a strong team attacking such a simple but big idea. We are delighted to partner with Benjamin and the entire TryNow team as they scale their elegant platform and help e-commerce brands close the conversion gap with brick and mortar retail.”

One clear sign of a maturing platform is when the company exposes the services it uses for its own tools to other developers. Zoom has been doing that for some time introducing Zoom Apps last year and the Marketplace to distribute and sell these apps. Today, the company introduced a new SDK (software development kit) to help developers embed Zoom video services inside another application.

“Our Video SDK enables developers to leverage Zoom’s industry-leading HD video, audio, and interactive features to build video-based applications and desktop experiences with native user interfaces,” Zoom’s Natalie Mullin wrote in a blog post announcing the new SDK.

If you want to include video in your app, you could try and code it yourself, or you could simply take advantage of Zoom’s expertise in this area and use the SDK to add video to the application and save a lot of time and effort.

The company envisions applications developers embedding video in social, gaming or retail applications where including video could enhance the user experience. For example, a shop owner could show different outfits to an online shopper in a live video feed, and discuss their tastes in real time.

Zoom CTO Brendan Ittelson said the SDK is actually part of a broader set of services designed to help developers take advantage of all the developer tooling that the company has been developing in recent years. As part of that push, the company is also announcing a central developer portal.

“We want to be able to have a single point where developers can go to to learn about all of the tools and resources that are available for them in the Zoom platform for their work in development, so we’re launching developer.zoom.us as that central hub for all developer resources,” Ittelson told me.

In addition, the company said that it wanted to give developers more data about how people are using the Zoom features in their applications, so they will be providing a new analytics dashboard with usage statistics.

“We are adding additional tools and actually providing developers with analytic dashboards. So folks that have developed apps for the Zoom ecosystem are able to see information about the usage of those apps across the platform,” Ittelson said.

He believes these tools combined with the new video SDK and existing set of tools will provide developers with a variety of options for building Zoom functionality into their applications, or embedding their application into Zoom as they see fit.

Berlin-based y42 (formerly known as Datos Intelligence), a data warehouse-centric business intelligence service that promises to give businesses access to an enterprise-level data stack that’s as simple to use as a spreadsheet, today announced that it has raised a $2.9 million seed funding round led by La Famiglia VC. Additional investors include the co-founders of Foodspring, Personio and Petlab.

The service, which was founded in 2020, integrates with over 100 data sources, covering all the standard B2B SaaS tools from Airtable to Shopify and Zendesk, as well as database services like Google’s BigQuery. Users can then transform and visualize this data, orchestrate their data pipelines and trigger automated workflows based on this data (think sending Slack notifications when revenue drops or emailing customers based on your own custom criteria).

Like similar startups, y42 extends the idea data warehouse, which was traditionally used for analytics, and helps businesses operationalize this data. At the core of the service is a lot of open source and the company, for example, contributes to GitLabs’ Meltano platform for building data pipelines.

y42 founder and CEO Hung Dang.

“We’re taking the best of breed open-source software. What we really want to accomplish is to create a tool that is so easy to understand and that enables everyone to work with their data effectively,” Y42 founder and CEO Hung Dang told me. “We’re extremely UX obsessed and I would describe us as no-code/low-code BI tool — but with the power of an enterprise-level data stack and the simplicity of Google Sheets.”

Before y42, Vietnam-born Dang co-founded a major events company that operated in over 10 countries and made millions in revenue (but with very thin margins), all while finishing up his studies with a focus on business analytics. And that in turn led him to also found a second company that focused on B2B data analytics.

Image Credits: y42

Even while building his events company, he noted, he was always very product- and data-driven. “I was implementing data pipelines to collect customer feedback and merge it with operational data — and it was really a big pain at that time,” he said. “I was using tools like Tableau and Alteryx, and it was really hard to glue them together — and they were quite expensive. So out of that frustration, I decided to develop an internal tool that was actually quite usable and in 2016, I decided to turn it into an actual company. ”

He then sold this company to a major publicly listed German company. An NDA prevents him from talking about the details of this transaction, but maybe you can draw some conclusions from the fact that he spent time at Eventim before founding y42.

Given his background, it’s maybe no surprise that y42’s focus is on making life easier for data engineers and, at the same time, putting the power of these platforms in the hands of business analysts. Dang noted that y42 typically provides some consulting work when it onboards new clients, but that’s mostly to give them a head start. Given the no-code/low-code nature of the product, most analysts are able to get started pretty quickly  — and for more complex queries, customers can opt to drop down from the graphical interface to y42’s low-code level and write queries in the service’s SQL dialect.

The service itself runs on Google Cloud and the 25-people team manages about 50,000 jobs per day for its clients. the company’s customers include the likes of LifeMD, Petlab and Everdrop.

Until raising this round, Dang self-funded the company and had also raised some money from angel investors. But La Famiglia felt like the right fit for y42, especially due to its focus on connecting startups with more traditional enterprise companies.

“When we first saw the product demo, it struck us how on top of analytical excellence, a lot of product development has gone into the y42 platform,” said Judith Dada, General Partner at LaFamiglia VC. “More and more work with data today means that data silos within organizations multiply, resulting in chaos or incorrect data. y42 is a powerful single source of truth for data experts and non-data experts alike. As former data scientists and analysts, we wish that we had y42 capabilities back then.”

Dang tells me he could have raised more but decided that he didn’t want to dilute the team’s stake too much at this point. “It’s a small round, but this round forces us to set up the right structure. For the series, A, which we plan to be towards the end of this year, we’re talking about a dimension which is 10x,” he told me.