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A new VC fund, “2150“, is launching with the first close of a €200m ($281m) fund which will back technologies aimed largely at reducing the carbon footprint of cities. For example, startups that inject carbon into concrete, or monitor the energy of buildings. The final close is anticipated by mid-2021.
The advisory board for 2150 comprises the former chief sustainability officer in the Obama administration and renowned urbanist and academic, Richard Florida. 2150 is based around the idea that half of the world’s population lives in cities, and this will increase to two-thirds by 2050, creating a growing environmental impact that the world can ill-afford, given the climate crisis.
Based across London, Copenhagen and Berlin, the fund’s Limited Partners include a mix of institutional capital and family offices including Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, Denmark’s Green Future Fund and Novo Holdings. 2150 says it has other LP partners who are building or managing “over 16 million square meters of real estate”, who will come in handy, kicking the tires on the efficacy of 2150 investments. The anchor funding has come from NREP, a sustainable real estate fund manager with a large Northern European footprint and platform.
The founding partners include Mikkel Bülow-Lehnsby, Chairman and co-founder of large real estate logistics company NREP; Jacob Bro, former Chief Product Officer at Rocket Internet; Christian Jølck, the founder and former Chairman of industry climate advocacy group SYNERGI; Christian Hernandez, former Facebook executive and VC; Nicole LeBlanc, formerly with Alphabet’s urban product incubator Sidewalk Labs; Rahul Parekh, founder of VC-backed foodtech startup EatFirst and former executive director at Goldman Sachs; and Alexandra Perez, who incubated and launched urban tech startups at Tech City Ventures.
2150 will focus on startups that can make cities more resilient, efficient and sustainable, investing in tech associated with the urban environment, materials, automation, and sensor-based monitoring to improve the health, safety, and productivity of building occupants. It says it will only invest where sustainability impact can be measured, aiming for a first portfolio of around 20 companies. Ticket sizes will be €4-5m series A for startups, but it will also invest in existing companies that want to expand.
Its first investment is in CarbonCure Technologies – a Canadian company lowering the CO2 footprint of concrete – in which 2150 participated in a funding round for last year, investing alongside Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund. At present, concrete accounts for 8% of all global CO2 emissions
Speaking to TechCrunch, Hernandez said 2150 was particularly interested in what’s coming to be known as “ESG Analytics” or “Carbon Accounting”. In other words, platforms that can analyze the impact of developments for an ESG and CO2 perspective.
The other background data which inspired the creation of the fund includes the fact that two billion new homes will need to be built over the next 80 years ; cities consume over two-thirds of the world’s energy and account for more than 70% of global CO2 emissions; 13% of global GDP is spent on construction, but the industry is slow to adopt new technology; and the UN has said ground-breaking innovation is needed in cities, where the battle for sustainable development will be “won or lost”.
Mikkel Bülow-Lehnsby, Partner at 2150 and Chairman and co-founder of NREP, said: “With NREP we have been on a 15-year mission of making real estate and cities more efficient, customer-centric and sustainable. With 2150 we are leveraging all of NREP’s learnings and ambitions and partnering with our industry peers to identify and accelerate technology that can help us support our purpose of making real estate better. I am convinced that 2150’s mission-aligned team will play an important role in designing a future in which the convergence of entrepreneurship, technology and sustainability will reverse the built environment’s negative impact on the planet.”
Christian Hernandez, Partner at 2150, said: “Cities are complex living systems that are constantly expanding, evolving and adapting, with half the world’s population now living in urban environments and rising. Cities, while vehicles for the betterment of humanity, currently emit 70% of the world’s greenhouse gases and generate the vast majority of the planet’s waste. We see a huge opportunity to make a serious impact on the way cities are developed and the way our citizens live, work and are cared for by completely reimagining and reshaping the urban environment for good.”
The advisory board for 2150 includes technologists, scientists and designers including well-known architect, Bjarke Ingels, the Director of Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment; Dr. Lynn Loo, Unity’s head of AI; Danny Lange, the former Chief Sustainability Officer in the Obama Administration; Christine Harada, the founder of sustainable developer EDGE Technologies; and Coen van Oostrom.
Facebook said it will begin restoring news sharing to Australian users’ feeds in “the coming days” after reaching an agreement with the country’s government. The social media giant made the drastic move of restricting news content in Australia last Wednesday after a dispute over a proposed media bargaining code that is expected to be voted into law soon. The code would have forced Facebook, and other major tech companies like Google, to make revenue-sharing agreements with publishers for content posted to their social media platforms.
Australian treasurer Josh Frydenberg said changes have been made to the code to “provide further clarity to digital platforms and news media businesses about the way the Code is intended to operate and strengthen the framework for ensuring news media businesses are fairly remunerated,” reported Seven News.
The amendments mean the code now includes a two-month mediation period to allow digital platforms like Facebook and publishers to agree on deals before they are forced to enter into arbitration. The Australian government will also consider commercial agreements tech platforms have already made with local publishers before deciding if the code applies to them, and give them one month’s notice before reaching a final decision.
William Easton, managing director of Facebook Australia and New Zealand, said in a statement that the company was “satisfied” with the changes, adding that they addressed Facebook’s “core concerns about allowing commercial deals that recognize the value our platform provides to publishers relative to the value we receive from them.”
Facebook’s restrictions last week meant Australian publishers were restricted from sharing or posting content from Facebook Pages, and users in Australia were unable to view or share Australian or international news content.
The Australian government announced in April 2020 it would adopt a mandatory code ordering Google, Facebook and other tech giants to pay local media for reusing their content, after an earlier attempt to create a voluntary code with the companies stalled.
As it lobbied against the proposed law, Facebook first threatened to restrict the public sharing of news content in Australia last September. Google also claimed that user experience in Australia would suffer and suggested it may no longer be able to offer free services in the country.
Katana, an Estonian startup that has built manufacturing-specific enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for SMBs, has raised $11 million in Series A funding.
Leading the round is European venture capital firm Atomico, with participation from angel investors Ott Kaukver (Checkout.com CTO), Sten Tamkivi (CPO Topia, formerly Skype), Sergei Anikin (CTO, Pipedrive) and Kairi Pauskar (former TransferWise HR Architect). Previous backer 42Cap also followed on, bringing the total investment raised by the company to date to $16 million.
Founded in 2017 by Kristjan Vilosius (CEO), Priit Kaasik (engineering lead) and Hannes Kert (CCO), Katana positions itself as the “entrepreneur manufacturer’s secret weapon” with a plug-and-play ERP for small to medium-sized manufacturers. The idea is to wean companies off existing antiquated tools such as spreadsheets and legacy software to manage inventory and production. The startup is also playing into macro trends, such as the advent of online marketplaces and D2C e-commerce, that are resulting in an explosion of independent makers, spanning cosmetics to home décor, electronics to apparel, and food and beverages.
“We are seeing a global renaissance of small manufacturing driven by the rise of e-commerce tools and consumer demand for bespoke products produced locally,” says Vilosius. “Just walk around any big city from London to San Francisco, and you’ll see workshops all around you. Someone’s making organic cosmetics here; over there, someone is making electric bikes. These companies are run by passionate entrepreneurs selling through traditional channels, but also selling through direct-to-consumer channels, e-commerce stores and marketplaces, etc. This is a massive boom of makers wanting to create products and sell them globally, and it is not a trend that will disappear tomorrow”.
The problem, however, is that small and medium-sized manufacturers don’t have the right software to support workflows necessary to sell through multiple channels — and this is where Katana comes in. The plug-and-play software claims a superior UX designed specifically to power boutique manufacturing, including functionality supporting the workflows of modern manufacturers, i.e. inventory control and optimization, and purchasing materials, managing bill-of-materials, tracking costs and more. It also offers an API and integrations with popular e-commerce sales channels and accounting tools such as Shopify, Amazon, WooCommerce, QuickBooks, Xero and others.
“We have built the world’s most self on-board-able manufacturing ERP, and that’s a very important differentiation between us and competitors,” explains Vilosius. “Implementation is so simple that more than half of Katana’s users self-onboard. It takes less than a week on average to get Katana up and running, compared to months for competitors”.
As an example of how a company might use Katana, imagine a boutique manufacturer using Shopify as their main sales channel. Once configured, Katana pulls in orders from Shopify and knows whether or not the product is available so it can be shipped immediately. If it’s unavailable, Katana displays if the necessary raw materials needed to manufacture are in stock and by when the product could be finished. “We handle the entire process from getting the raw materials in the warehouse to planning manufacturing activities, executing and shipping when the product is done,” says Vilosius.
Image Credits: Katana
Cue statement from Atomico partner Ben Blume, who joins the Katana board: “Atomico has always believed in the strength of Estonian-built engineering and product, and as we got to know the team at Katana, we saw a familiar pattern: a relentlessly product-focussed team with the incredible ability to build and think from their customer’s point of view, and an unwavering belief that a new generation of manufacturers with big ideas shouldn’t have to settle for less than world-class technology to support them.”
Lucid Motors reached an agreement to become a publicly traded company through a merger with special-purpose acquisition company Churchill Capital IV Corp, in the largest deal yet between a blank-check company and electric vehicle startup.
The combined company, in which Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund will continue to be the largest shareholder, will have a transaction equity value of $11.75 billion. Private investment in the public equity deal is priced at $15 a share, putting the implied the pro-forma equity value at $24 billion. The announcement comes more than a week after Bloomberg, citing unnamed sources, reported a deal was close to being finalized.
Lucid follows a string of other, albeit smaller valued, SPAC mergers with electric vehicle startups that have been announced this year, including Arrival, Canoo, Fisker and Lordstown Motors. Several EV infrastructure companies including EVgo and ChargePoint have also become public companies via SPAC mergers.
Lucid might have been the most anticipated. The hype and speculation that has been rampant for weeks drove up the stock price of Churchill Capital IV Corp from its opening price of $10 a share more than 470% since January 2021. The skyrocketing share price, plummeted more than 30% after the details of the deal were announced.
The private investment and cash from Churchill will provide roughly $4.4 billion in total funding to Lucid. That capital will be put to work to speed up and expand Lucid’s plans. The company plans to begin production and deliveries of the Lucid Air in North America in the second half of this year. The Air will come to Europe in 2022, followed by China in 2023. The Gravity performance luxury SUV is expected to come to market in North America in 2023. The vehicles will be produced at its new factory in Casa Grande, Arizona.
The funding will be used to bring those two vehicles to market as well as to expand its factory in Arizona, Lucid CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson said Monday. The company plans to expand the factory over another three phases in the coming years to have the capacity to produce 365,000 units per year at scale. The initial phase of the $700 million factory was completed late last year and will have the capacity to produce 30,000 vehicles a year.
Image Credits: Lucid Motors
The deal will also help Lucid realize its vision to supply electric vehicle technologies to third parties such as other automotive manufacturers as well as offer energy storage solutions in the residential, commercial and utility segments, Rawlinson said.
Scaling an electric vehicle company is not cheap or easy. Lucid narrowly missed imploding several years ago as it struggled to find an investor that would provide the capital it needed to bring its ultra-luxe electric Air sedan into production. That investor ended up being Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which agreed in September 2018 to invest $1 billion into Lucid Motors.
Lucid began in 2007 as Atieva, a company founded by former Tesla VP and board member Bernard Tse and entrepreneur Sam Weng that focused on developing electric car battery technology. The early research, development and eventual progress in the components and overall electric architecture would lay the critical ground work for the future Lucid, which emerged at the end of 2016 with new publicly stated purpose to make electric vehicles (although the company had already been working quietly at this for a couple of years). Rawlinson, who left Tesla to join Lucid in 2013 as CTO, was one of the driving forces behind this new mission. He later took on the CEO title and responsibility as well.
While Lucid is often couched as a competitor to Tesla, Rawlinson has told TechCrunch the Air is meant to be a rival of the Mercedes S Class, the internal combustion engine flagship of the German automaker. The investor presentation released Monday echoes Rawlinson’s earlier comments, noting that “Tesla is innovative but not luxury.” Lucid describes itself as “post luxury” and in competition with “established luxury” brands Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
Lucid is taking a page out of Tesla’s playbook and outlined plans to eventually offer more affordable EVs once it scales production.
Rawlinson will remain as CEO and CTO. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter.
Not everyone has Type 2 Diabetes, the disease that causes chronically high blood sugar levels, but many do. Around 9% of Americans are afflicted, and another 30% are at risk of developing it.
Enter software by January AI, a four-year-old, subscription-based startup that in November began providing personalized nutritional and activity-related suggestions to its customers based on a combination of food-related data the company has spent the last three years painstakingly amassing, as well as each person’s unique profile, which it gleans based on how an individual reacts to certain foods over the first four days of using the software.
Why the need for personalization? Because believe it or not, people can react very differently to every single food, from rice to salad dressing.
The tech may sound mundane but it’s eye-opening, promises cofounder and CEO Nosheen Hashemi and her cofounder, Michael Snyder, a genetics professor at Stanford who has focused on diabetes and pre-diabetes for years.
Investors apparently agree, too. Felicis Ventures just led a $21 million Series A investment in the company, joined by HAND Capital and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff. (Earlier investors include Ame Cloud Ventures, SignalFire, YouTube cofounder Steve Chen, and Sunshine cofounder Marissa Mayer, among others.) Says Felicis founder Aydin Senkut, “While other companies have made headway in understanding biometric sensor data—from heart rate and glucose monitors, for example—January AI has made progress in analyzing and predicting the effects of food consumption itself [which is] key to addressing chronic disease.”
We talked with Hashemi and Snyder this afternoon to learn more. Below is part of our chat, edited for length and clarity.
TC: What have you built?
NH: We’ve built a multiomic platform where we take data from different sources and predict people’s glycemic response, allowing them to consider their choices before they make them. We pull in data from heart rate monitors and continuous glucose monitors and a 1,000-person clinical study and an atlas of 16 million foods for which, using machine learning, we have derived nutritional values and created nutritional labeling [that didn’t exist previously].
[The idea is to] predict for [customers] what their glycemic response is going to be to any food in our database after just four days of training. They don’t actually have to eat the food to know whether they should eat it or not; our product tells them what their response is going to be.
TC: So glucose monitoring existed previously, but this is predictive. Why is this important?
NH: We want to bring the joy back to eating and remove the guilt. We can predict, for example, how long you’d have to walk after eating any food in our database in order to keep your blood sugar at the right level. Knowing what “is” isn’t enough; we want to tell you what to do about it. If you’re thinking about fried chicken and a shake, we can tell you: you’re going to have to walk 46 minutes afterward to maintain a healthy [blood sugar] range. Would you like to do the uptime for that? No? Then maybe [eat the chicken and shake] on a Saturday.
TC: This is subscription software that works with other wearables and that costs $488 for three months.
NH: That’s retail price, but we have an introductory offer of $288.
TC: Are you at all concerned that people will use the product, get a sense of what they could be doing differently, then end their subscription?
NH: No. Pregnancy changes [one’s profile], age changes it. People travel and they aren’t always eating the same things. . .
MS: I’ve been wearing [continuous glucose monitoring] wearables for seven years and I still learn stuff. You suddenly realize that every time you eat white rice, you spike through the roof, for example. That’s true for many people. But we are also offering a year-long subscription soon because we do know that people slip sometimes [only to be reminded] later that these boosters are very valuable.
TC: How does it work practically? Say I’m at a restaurant and I’m in the mood for pizza but I don’t know which one to order.
NH: You can compare curve over curve to see which is healthier. You can see how much you’ll have to walk [depending on the toppings].
TC: Do I need to speak all of these toppings into my smart phone?
NH: January scans barcodes, it also understands photos. It also has manual entry, and it takes voice [commands].
TC: Are you doing anything else with this massive food database that you’ve aggregated and that you’re enriching with your own data?
NH: We will definitely not sell personal information.
TC: Not even aggregated data? Because it does sound like a useful database . . .
MS: We’re not 23andMe; that’s really not the goal.
TC: You mentioned that rice can cause someone’s blood sugar to soar, which is surprising. What are some of the things that might surprise people about what your software can show them?
NH: The way people’s glycemic response is so different, not just between by Connie and Mike, but also for Connie and Connie. If you eat nine days in a row, your glycemic response could be different each of those nine days because of how much you slept or how much thinking you did the day before or how much fiber was in your body and whether you ate before bedtime.
Activity before eating and activity after eating is important. Fiber is important. It’s the most under overlooked intervention in the American diet. Our ancestral diets featured 150 grams of fiber a day; the average American diet today includes 15 grams of fiber. A lot of health issues can be traced to a lack of fiber.
TC: It seems like coaching would be helpful in concert with your app. Is there a coaching component?
NH: We don’t offer a coaching component today, but we’re in talks with several coaching solutions as we speak, to be the AI partner to them.
TC: Who else are you partnering with? Healthcare companies? Employers that can offer this as a benefit?
NH: We are selling to direct to consumers, but we’ve already had a pharma customer for two years. Pharma companies are very interested in working with us because we are able to use lifestyle as a biomarker. We essentially give them [anonymized] visibility into someone’s lifestyle for a period of two weeks or however long they want to run the program for so they can gain insights as to whether the therapeutic is working because of the person’s lifestyle or in spite of a person’s lifestyle. Pharma companies are very interested in working with us because they can potentially get answers in a trial phase faster and even reduce the number of subjects they need.
So we’re excited about pharma. We are also very interested in working with employers, with coaching solutions, and ultimately, with payers [like insurance companies].
