& meet dozens of singles today!
User blogs
Rust — the programming language, not the survival game — now has a new home: the Rust Foundation. AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla banded together to launch this new foundation today and put a two-year commitment to a million-dollar budget behind it. This budget will allow the project to “develop services, programs, and events that will support the Rust project maintainers in building the best possible Rust.”
Rust started out as a side project inside of Mozilla to develop an alternative to C/C++ . Designed by Mozilla Research’s Graydon Hore, with contributions from the likes of JavaScript creator Brendan Eich, Rust became the core language for some of the fundamental features of the Firefox browser and its Gecko engine, as well as Mozilla’s Servo engine. Today, Rust is the most-loved language among developers. But with Mozilla’s layoffs in recent months, a lot of the Rust team lost its job and the future of the language became unclear without a main sponsor, though the project itself has thousands of contributors and a lot of corporate users, so the language itself wasn’t going anywhere.
A large open-source project often needs some kind of guidance, which the new foundation will provide — and it takes a legal entity to manage various aspects of the community, including the trademark, for example. The new Rust board will feature five board directors from the five founding members, as well as five directors from project leadership.
“Mozilla incubated Rust to build a better Firefox and contribute to a better Internet,” writes Bobby Holley, Mozilla and Rust Foundation Board member, in a statement. “In its new home with the Rust Foundation, Rust will have the room to grow into its own success, while continuing to amplify some of the core values that Mozilla shares with the Rust community.”
All of the corporate sponsors have a vested interest in Rust and are using it to build (and rebuild) core aspects of some of their stacks. Google recently said that it will fund a Rust-based project that aims to make the Apache webserver safer, for example, while Microsoft recently formed a Rust team, too, and is using the language to rewrite some core Windows APIs. AWS recently launched Bottlerocket, a new Linux distribution for containers that, for example, features a build system that was largely written in Rust.
DoorDash is expanding its robotic footprint into the kitchen. The delivery service is set to acquire Chowbotics, a Bay Area-based robotics best known for its salad-making robot, Sally. TechCrunch has confirmed the acquisition, which was first noted by The Wall Street Journal.
“We have long admired the work that Chowbotics has done to increase access to fresh meals, with its groundbreaking robotics product and vision,” DoorDash co-founder Stanley Tang said in a comment offered to TechCrunch. “At DoorDash, we are always working to innovate and continue improving how we support our merchant partners and their success — and are excited to leverage this technology to do so in new ways. With the Chowbotics team on board, we can explore new use cases and customers, providing another service to help our merchants grow.”
Founded in 2014, Chowbotics has raised around $21 million to date, including an $11 million round back in 2018. The company’s vending machine-style salad bar robot was already well-positioned for the pandemic, removing a human element from the food preparation process — not to mention the fact that salad bars and buffets tend to be open air affairs. In October, the startup added a contactless feature to the robot, letting users order ahead of time, via app.
“Joining the DoorDash team unlocks new possibilities for Chowbotics and the technology that this team has built over the past seven years,” CEO Rick Wilmer said in a statement. “As the leader in food delivery and on-demand logistics, DoorDash has the unparalleled reach and expertise to help us grow and deploy our technology more broadly, so together, we can make fresh, nutritious food easy for more people.”
It’s not entirely clear how the company’s technology will fit into the delivery service’s current offering, though DoorDash notes it will “improve consumer access to fresh and safe meals, and enhance our robust merchant offerings and logistics platform.” It also remains to be seen whether Chowbotics will continue to operate as its own entity within the broader DoorDash. We’ve reached out for more insight.
“At DoorDash, we strive to become a merchant’s first call when they want to grow their business,” Tang said. “What excites us most about Chowbotics is that the team has developed a remarkable tool for helping merchants grow. Bringing Chowbotics’ technology into the DoorDash platform gives us a new opportunity to help merchants expand their current menu offerings and reach new customers in new markets — which is a fundamental part of our merchant-first approach to empowering local economies.”
DoorDash has been working with robotics companies for a number of years now. Perhaps the most prominent example is a partnership with Starship Technologies to explore food delivery robots. Though that technology has seen a fair number of roadblocks among local officials not eager to turn their sidewalks over to robots. The delivery company likens Chowbotics’ kiosk-style technology to its work with ghost kitchens, effectively serving as a conduit to help expand food options at local merchants – be it in store or through delivery. The former will likely be of more interest once the current pandemic is in the rear view.
Details of the acquisition have not been disclosed.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/08/doordash-acquires-salad-making-robotics-startup-chowbotics/
Last week, another container security startup came off the board when Rapid7 bought Alcide for $50 million. The purchase is part of a broader trend in which larger companies are buying up cloud-native security startups at a rapid clip. But why is there so much M&A action in this space now?
Palo Alto Networks was first to the punch, grabbing Twistlock for $410 million in May 2019. VMware struck a year later, snaring Octarine. Cisco followed with PortShift in October and Red Hat snagged StackRox last month before the Rapid7 response last week.
This is partly because many companies chose to become cloud-native more quickly during the pandemic. This has created a sharper focus on security, but it would be a mistake to attribute the acquisition wave strictly to COVID-19, as companies were shifting in this direction pre-pandemic.
It’s also important to note that security startups that cover a niche like container security often reach market saturation faster than companies with broader coverage because customers often want to consolidate on a single platform, rather than dealing with a fragmented set of vendors and figuring out how to make them all work together.
Containers provide a way to deliver software by breaking down a large application into discrete pieces known as microservices. These are packaged and delivered in containers. Kubernetes provides the orchestration layer, determining when to deliver the container and when to shut it down.
This level of automation presents a security challenge, making sure the containers are configured correctly and not vulnerable to hackers. With myriad switches this isn’t easy, and it’s made even more challenging by the ephemeral nature of the containers themselves.
Yoav Leitersdorf, managing partner at YL Ventures, an Israeli investment firm specializing in security startups, says these challenges are driving interest in container startups from large companies. “The acquisitions we are seeing now are filling gaps in the portfolio of security capabilities offered by the larger companies,” he said.
SoftBank reported earnings today, including the performance of its $98.6 billion Vision Fund. The numbers were enticing given the recent exit of DoorDash, which returned billions to SoftBank and represents one of its first truly blockbuster investments out of the fund. The company has now seen 18 investments exit, including 10 fully exited and eight that are now trading on the public markets.
Yet, tucked away deeply in the company’s earnings statement was a note that the company has cut the performance incentive earmarked for the Vision Fund’s leadership in half, from $5 billion to $2.5 billion.
That $5 billion incentive scheme was controversial when news of it was first reported by publications like the Financial Times back in April 2018. In the model, SoftBank essentially loaned its employees money to buy into the Vision Fund, a structure that was designed to accelerate the closing of the fund’s $100 billion fundraise. The company first added language about the incentive scheme in its 2018Q2 earnings, writing:
On October 19, 2018, SoftBank Vision Fund completed an interim closing with additional committed capital of $5 billion. This brought the total committed capital of the Fund to $96.7 billion. The additional committed capital is intended for the installment of an incentive scheme for operations of SoftBank Vision Fund.
Since then, the company has had consistent language about the $5 billion figure in every quarterly earnings report. However, in today’s latest earnings for fiscal 2020Q3, the company noted that the incentives are now “$2.5 billion (decreased from the previous $5.0 billion).”
The incentive scheme for SoftBank has been a huge point of discussion for industry observers. Four top executives at SoftBank — Rajeev Misra, Marcelo Claure, Katsunori Sago and Ken Miyauchi have collectively been loaned $600 million to buy into the Vision Fund, according to a report two weeks ago in the Financial Times. Some of that money was derived from the $5 billion (now $2.5 billion) incentive scheme, although it isn’t clear if all that money was earmarked exclusively from this particular pool.
SoftBank’s pullback on incentives for the Vision Fund is seemingly a response to the fund’s overall lackluster performance and the fund’s disastrous investment in WeWork, which led to wide losses at the telecom group. While more recent performance has been much better for the fund, eliminating some of those incentives should improve overall performance of the fund and ultimately SoftBank’s bottom line.
Vision Fund I has stopped investing in new companies as of last year. A second fund has $10 billion in capital — all from SoftBank itself — and has been making regular investments. The Vision Fund has also been raising SPACs, including two new ones it announced late last week.
The French government and the government-backed initiative La French Tech unveiled the new indexes that identify the most promising French startups. The 40 top-performing startups are called the Next40, and the top 120 startups are grouped into the French Tech 120.
The Next40 and French Tech 120 are somewhat new as this is only the second version of those indexes. Out of the 120 startups that were already in last year’s French Tech 120, 90 of them are still in this year’s index — 30 are newcomers as there were 123 startups in last year’s French Tech 120.
Combined, they generate close to €9 billion in revenue and provide a job to 37,500 people. Revenue in particular is up 55% compared to last year’s French Tech 120.
Here’s a list of the French Tech 120 — the red logos are part of the Next40:
Image Credits: La French Tech
There are two different ways to get accepted in the Next40:
- You have raised more than €100 million over the past three years ($120 million at today’s rate) or you are a unicorn, which means your company’s valuation has reached $1 billion or more.
- You generate more than €5 million in revenue with a year-over-year growth rate of 30% or more for the past three years.
As for the remaining 80 startups in the French Tech 120:
- 40 of them have raised more than €20 million in a funding round over the past three years.
- 40 of them are selected based on the annual turnover and growth rate.
Of course, those indexes are limited to private French companies. For the French Tech 120, there are at least two startups per administrative region.
Based on those metrics, only a handful of the startups in the French Tech 120 have a female CEO and the French government thinks tech startups should do more when it comes to diversity and inclusion. That’s why a small group of people are going to work on a roadmap and some recommendations to improve those numbers.
Representatives of six different startups in the French Tech 120 as well as people from Sista, Tech Your Place and Future Positive Capital will get together to work on those topics.
In addition to a cool logo for your website, being part of the French Tech 120 comes with some perks. Those companies can access a network of French Tech representatives in different public administrations.
For instance, it’s easier for your company if you want to get visas for foreign employees, obtain a certification or a patent, if you want to sell your product to a public administration, etc.
There are two new additions to the French Tech network. Someone from the Conseil d’État can help you when it comes to legal compliance. The government has also signed a partnership with Euronext to educate entrepreneurs about going public.
