& meet dozens of singles today!
User blogs
Joby Aviation, a startup that has spent a more than a decade developing an all-electric, vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft, will become a public company through a merger with Reinvent Technology Partners, a special purpose acquisition company from well-known investor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
The combined company, which will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, will have a pro forma implied valuation of $6.6 billion. Through the deal, Joby is capturing $1.6 billion in cash proceeds — $690 million of which will come from Reinvent’s cash in trust and an $835 million from private investors The Baupost Group, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Fidelity Management & Research LLC and Baillie Gifford. A $75 million convertible note, from Uber, will also be converted into common stock at a $10 per share value.
While SPAC deals typically put in place terms to prevent major shareholders from pulling out their money, this merger puts a long-term lock-up on founder JoeBen Bevirt’s shares for up to five years. The deal also includes an earnout structure with full vesting that cannot be realized until the share price reaches $50 per share, which implies more than a $30 billion market capitalization.
Joby plans to use the capital to fund the launch of passenger service, which is expected to begin in 2024. The company still must complete certification of its aircraft and develop manufacturing facilities, but it is already on its way to achieving both.
Joby has agreed to a “G-1” certification basis for its aircraft with the Federal Aviation Administration, which specifies the requirements that need to be met by the company’s aircraft for it to be certified for commercial operations.
Joby is also planning to begin construction on a 450,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, designed in conjunction with Toyota, later this year.
Prior to its SPAC deal, Joby had gained attention and investors over the years as it developed its eVTOL. Toyota became an important backer and partner, leading a $620 million Series C round of funding in January 2020. Nearly a year later, Joby acquired Uber’s air taxi moonshot Elevate as part of a complex deal. Under the terms, Uber offloaded Elevate to Joby Aviation and invested $75 million into the startup. The two companies also expanded an existing partnership.
The $75 million investment was in addition to a previously undisclosed $50 million investment made by Uber as part of Joby’s Series C financing round. Uber has invested a total of $125 million into the startup. Joby Aviation had raised $820 million before its bid to become a publicly traded company.
Knowledge workers — those whose professions tend to be anchored to desks or computers — have long been the most obvious and primary focus for a lot of B2B apps and services. But as the wider world migrates to doing more and more on smartphones and other connected devices, the opportunity to build for the rest of the global workforce continues to grow. Today, one of the startups targeting smaller businesses in the area of field service is announcing a round of funding that underscores that trend.
Workiz, which has developed a platform to help small business in the home services space — locksmiths, removals companies, large appliance repairs, and others — book jobs, manage teams, keep in communication with customers, bill them, and also — taking a page from the world of knowledge workers — run data analytics connected to their jobs to optimize business more in the future, has closed a funding round of $13 million.
The funding round was oversubscribed — it actually grew to $13 million in the week between getting pitched this story and writing it — and it comes on the back of a year that has seen double-digit growth exceeding what the startup had expected to achieve in 2020, said CEO Adi (Didi) Azaria in an interview.
Part of the reason has been an uplift from people spending more time working at home, putting their dwellings and the things contained in them through more wear and tear, and/or realizing that they could do some home improvement and vastly upgrade their daily environments.
“If you open the fridge too many times, things get broken and you need these guys to come in,” he said, adding that the demand from customers these days are for people to be using the same tools they are to get work done. “Many field services need software because our expectations as consumers are changing. They see it as a need.”
Workiz’s CEO himself was once a locksmith, similar to co-founders Idan Kadosh and Erez Marom (who co-founded the startup with Saar Kohanovitch), but he might be better known for co-founding his previous startup, Sisense, the business analytics company now valued at over $1 billion.
Workiz is based out of San Diego and Israel, with the latter home to its R&D efforts and a number of its investors. This Series B is being led by Tel Aviv’s New Era Capital Partners, with past backers Aleph, Magenta Venture Partners (which led its Series A), Maor Investments, and TMT Investments also participating in the round.
Valuation is not being disclosed but there are some signs that it’s on the up for the startup. Workiz’s services — the startup’s name incidentally is pronounced not like a cute version of work, “workies”, but like “work is” as the company’s official name is actually Workiz Easy — are live in the U.S. and Canada, and it currently has some 100,000 service professionals using the platform.
Since the startup was founded in 2015 (originally as Send a Job), more than 12 million jobs, 100 million text messages, and $5 billion in job revenue have been initiated through it.
For a point of comparison, a direct competitor, Jobber, earlier this year closed a $60 million round also after hitting 100,000 service professionals on its platform.
Despite that competition — and it’s a crowded field, with others like ServiceTitan, GE’s ServiceMax, BigChange in the U.K., new approaches like Super, and many others in the market — field service remains a big market, with some 20 million businesses globally focused on home services, with 5 million in the U.S. alone.
The opportunity for a startup like Workiz within that is to figure out what needs are currently not being addressed as well by existing offerings, and building them into its own solution.
One example of that, Azaria points out, has been the company’s voice service. He notes that most field service professionals before the rise of mobile apps had organized and updated customers and head offices of their whereabouts and progress through phone calls.
In some cases that is not hugely efficient, since it only alerts the person you are calling, not a whole team, and sometimes the person you are speaking with is not the person who needs the update most. But, it also remains a key way to connect with customers especially when there are delays. The phone service that the company offers integrates with other details about a job, letting the call become part of the bigger work log for everyone else to see.
Another is scheduling, which has been a complicated issue to manage especially in cases when you have small teams of users who need to work in close conjunction with each other. Workiz’s scheduling tools essentially work like a shared Google Calendar to help match people with skills, locations and jobs to get work booked and done faster.
The company’s toolkit, interestingly, has features that highlight business analytics too: you can currently manage call tracking, lead tracking and a live dashboard to measure how long jobs are taking and whether scheduling is mapping accurately or not. These are next-level tools that do remind me a little of Sisense and point precisely to how software and goals envisioned for the average data/knowledge worker are now being recast for those on their feet and in the field.
This also leaves the door open for the option to build in more lead generation into the platform, essentially creating a marketplace for field service professionals to connect with customers seeking people to do specific jobs, although it’s not an area the company is exploring for now at least.
“At this point we focus on SaaS and making a best-of-breed solution. We’re not in the lead generation market. We try to focus because we understand how challenging it is to be a field service engineer, with phone calls, stress and disorganization,” he said. “Most of them still use pen and paper and need tools to organizse the day. Many of them can advertise or use third party companies for lead generation, although maybe in the future we might do more on that.” For now, he said, the focus will remain on tools to address their more immediate needs just to get through their workdays and helping them be more professional, to “make the service person look larger than what they are.”
“Field service management is a market ripe for disruption, with a technological approach that is both agile and competitive,” said Gideon Argov, managing at New Era Capital Partners, in a statement. “In Workiz, we found all the elements for success, coupled with passionate leadership that started from the field. We are delighted to join the Workiz team.” Argov is joining the board with this round.
It’s almost too simple. You get a tablet made of household chemicals that can be dissolved in water which can become a cleaning spray for the kitchen, glass and bathroom, with no need to ship the water it is dissolved into because it literally comes out of your tap. That was the premise of Munich-based startup everdrop and it’s been a hit not just with consumers, but also with investors. It’s now raised an €18m ($21.8m) Series A funding round led by Felix Capital, with participation from HV Capital and Vorwerk Ventures. Everdrop now plans to develop a wider range of sustainable household products and market them across Europe, and eventually the US.
Launched in Dec 2019, the cleaning tablet also removes the need for single-use plastic bottles, thus appealing to environmentally conscious consumers, (unusually for a consumer good company, the startup has 110,000 followers on Instagram).
Everdrop estimates it was able to eliminate over 2.5 million single-use plastic bottles with their tabs.
David Löwe, Co-Founder of everdrop told me in an interview that while it might be possible to clone the company’s formats, it would not be easy to replicate its water hardness calculator: “Plus, the individualizing of the laundry detergent is quite unique. I think there’s no one out there in other countries who are doing that at the moment… But obviously, other companies could potentially do that too.”
Everdrop competes with Grove Collaborative, Blueland and to some extent The Honest Company.
Löwe told me: “If I’m very honest, it would be cool if the other companies would do it because this is something that I’m really convinced about. If we inspire with our success, the big corporations could finally change into more sustainable products.”
As well as the tablet, everdrop now has a range of sustainable laundry detergents, also microplastic-free, which addresses water hardness by tailoring the detergent to the water in the customer’s home area. This means everdrop can save up to 50% of the unnecessary surfactants in the detergent. Laundry detergent is the biggest chemical emitter in private households. Everdrop estimates its approach saves 250 tons of unnecessary surfactants from going into the environment.
Its latest product is a “naked” dishwasher tablet which doesn’t have the plastic wrapper that usually envelops these products.
David Fischer, investor at HV Capital said: “It is incredible how a truly sustainable brand such as everdrop has a similar growth trajectory in its inception year as its D2C peers Hims and DollarShaveClub.”
Bay Area-based AI startup Symbio today announced its “official launch.” Backed by a total of $30 million in funding, the company has struck deals with both Nissan and Toyota to implement its software in U.S.-based factories.
The company says its SymbioDCS technology is capable of dramatically increasing automation with factory robots on the assembly line.
“To the end customer, the proposition is pretty straightforward,” CEO and co-founder Max Reynolds tells TechCrunch. “We’re improving the efficiency of their automation. The high-level goal is to increase the capacity of the factory and enable them to build more product, more quickly, more flexibly. “
The company closed a $15 million Series B in December of last year. That adds to a $12 million Series A in 2018, $2.5 million seed two years prior and a $500,000 pre-seed. This latest round was led by ACME Capital, joining existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse Ventures and The House Fund.
Image Credits: Symbio
“Instead of exclusively providing automation solutions, Symbio is also designing the tools that enable the developers and domain experts working in manufacturing to create their own automation solutions and easily adapt them to new tasks,” UC Berkeley professor Anca Dragan said in a statement tied to the news. “To do this, they are building products that leverage AI strengths and human insight in a symbiotic way.”
Founded in 2014, the company employs around 40, mostly engineers, largely based in California. Reynolds explains that the current level of automated manufacturing in automotive is actually far lower than one might expect. “Assembly is less than 5% automated, across the board,” he says. “Even in this core vertical, there’s a ton of headroom and opportunity for growth.”
India’s Flipkart said on Wednesday it will deploy more than 25,000 electric vehicles in its supply chain by 2030 as the Walmart-owned e-commerce giant looks to achieve a 100% transition to electric mobility in the next 10 years.
The Bangalore-headquartered firm said it has partnered with leading EV makers including Hero Electric, Mahindra Electric, and Piaggio to build vehicles for its first and last mile delivery fleets across the country.
The announcement comes a day after rival Amazon said it had partnered with Mahindra Electric to develop “close to hundred” electric three-wheeler in India. The American e-commerce giant last year pledged to deploy 10,000 electric vehicles in the country by 2025.
Hey, India. We’re rolling out our new fleet of electric delivery rickshaws. Fully electric. Zero carbon. #ClimatePledge pic.twitter.com/qFXdZOsY4y
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) January 20, 2020
Flipkart said its electric fleet will include two-wheeler, three-wheeler, and four-wheeler vehicles, all of which will be designed and assembled in India. The company said it has already started to pilot two-wheeler and three-wheeler electric vehicles in “multiple locations” in India including Delhi, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and Guwahati.
In recent years, New Delhi has pushed to replace gasoline and diesel vehicles in India with environmentally friendly electric vehicles. Reuters reported in 2019 that the Indian government was planning to order ride-hailing firms such as Ola and Uber to convert 40% of their fleets to electric by April 2026.
“Electrification of the logistics fleet is a key part of Flipkart’s larger sustainability goal and in line with our commitment to the Climate Group’s EV100 initiative,” said Amitesh Jha, SVP of Ekart and Marketplace at Flipkart, in a statement.
“In this journey of making our logistics fleet completely electric by 2030, we will collaborate and work with leading local players to procure and deploy electric vehicles while supporting the required infrastructure growth. We understand the relevance of electric mobility in achieving both business and sustainability goals and are committed to paving the way for greater adoption of EVs across the country,” he added.
The company said over the past year it has worked to create a network of ecosystem partners across charging providers, skill development agencies, aggregators, and original equipment manufacturers.
The company, which is expected to publicly list later this year, identified three models that will feature in its electric vehicles fleet: Nyx series by Hero Electric, which offers extended driving range of up to 150 kilometers (93.2 miles) per charge; Treo Zor by Mahindra Electric, which features “highest-in-class payload of 550kg (1212.5 pounds)”; and Ape’ E Xtra FX by Piaggio.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/24/flipkart-to-deploy-over-25000-electric-vehicles-by-2030/
