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Popular, highly-scrutinized trading app Robinhood has raised $2.4 billion to its balance sheet from shareholders, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal and then confirmed by the company. The private startup raised $1 billion on Friday, meaning that it has raised $3.4 billion in a handful of days as it seeks to support a flood of retail investors looking to invest in individual stocks on its app – spurred by Redditors investing in GameStop in a effort to frustrate short sellers, in part.
Per Robinhood, the new funds were “led by Ribbit Capital, with participation from existing investors including ICONIQ, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Index Ventures, and NEA with terms being finalized.” It’s somewhat unconventional to announce a raise that is still being sorted, but Robinhood wants to calm nerves, so shouting about the capital ahead of the paperwork being fully smoothed makes some sense.
The new capital comes at a challenging time for the unicorn, which could pursue an IPO this year – but also a time when it’s enjoying considerable public attention, likely introducing it to many potential new users.
Last week, Robinhood found itself overwhelmed by the demand of new investors looking to invest in meme-stocks such as GameStop and AMC. Robinhood had to temporarily ban trading on these stocks due to stiff financial requirements. As of right now, Robinhood users are limited to buying just a few shares of GameStop and other stocks despite the company haven taken on more capital since the GameStop run began.
TechCrunch emailed Robinhood asking for details of the $2.4 billion infusion, curious if it was raised as primary capital, convertible debt that could convert at the time of a public offering, or other mechanism. Update: Robinhood declined to comment on the record. Sources familiar, however, tell TechCrunch that the funds were raised in the form of a convertible note. Forbes initially broke the news that the financing was raised as a convertible note.
“[A]mid this week’s extraordinary circumstances in the market, we made a tough decision today to temporarily limit buying for certain securities. As a brokerage firm, we have many financial requirements, including SEC net capital obligations and clearinghouse deposits. Some of these requirements fluctuate based on volatility in the markets and can be substantial in the current environment. These requirements exist to protect investors and the markets and we take our responsibilities to comply with them seriously, including through the measures we have taken today,” the company wrote in a post.
In other words: Robinhood ran low on capital, which meant it had to limit the frenzy of activity on its app. While the reasons behind Robinhood’s limits were technical, investors largely saw the constriction as a slap in the face in favor of hedge funds. Late Friday, Robinhood released yet another blog post detailing what happened during what some see as a pivotal week in the company’s trajectory.
“Our goal is to enable purchasing for all securities on our platform. This is a dynamic, volatile market, and we have and may continue to take action to make sure we meet our requirements as a broker so we can continue to serve our customers for the long term,” the statement read.
Today’s new capital will likely help Robinhood add some much needed buffer room, to the delight of its customers and investors.
Weights & Biases, a startup building tools for machine learning practitioners, is announcing that it’s raised $45 million in Series B funding.
The company was founded by Lukas Biewald, Chris Van Pelt and Shawn Lewis — Biewald and Van Pelt previously founded CrowdFlower/Figure Eight (acquired by Appen). Weights & Biases says it now has more than 70,000 users at more than 200 enterprises.
Biewald (who I’ve known since college) argued that while machine learning practitioners are often compared to software developers, “they’re more like scientists in some ways than engineers.” It’s a process that involves numerous experiments, and Weights & Biases’ core product allows practitioners to track those experiments, while the company also offers tools around dataset versioning, model evaluation and pipeline management.
“If you have a model that’s controlling a self-driving car and the car crashes you really want to know what happened,” Biewald said. “If you built that model year ago and you’ve run all these experiments since then, it can be hard to systematically trace through what happened” unless you’re using experiment tracking.
He described the startup as “an early leader” in this market, and as competing tools emerge, eh said it’s also differentiated by “completely focused on the ML practitioner” rather than top-down enterprise sales. Similarly, he said that as machine learning has been adopted by more widely, Weights & Biases is occasionally confronted by a “high-class problem.”
Image Credits: Weights & Biases
“We’re not interested in selling to companies that are doing machine learning for machine learning’s sake,” Biewald said. “With some companies, there’s a mandate from the CEO to sprinkle some machine learning in the company. That’s just really depressing to me, to not have any impact. But I would actually say the vast majority of companies that we talk to really do something useful.”
For example, he said agriculture giant John Deere is using the startup’s platform to continually improve the way it uses robotics to spray fertilizer, rather than pesticide, to kill weeds and pests. And there are pharmaceutical companies using the platform as how they model how different molecules will behave.
Weights & Biases previously raised $20 million in funding. The new round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from Coatue, Trinity Ventures and Bloomberg Beta. Insight’s George Mathew is joining the board of directors.
“I’ve never seen a MLOps category leader with such a high NPS and deep customer focus as Weights and Biases,” Mathew said George Mathew said in a statement.“It’s an honor to make my first investment at Insight to serve an ML practitioner user-base that grew 60x these last two years.”
The startup says it will use the funding to continue hiring in engineering, growth, sales and customer success.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/weights-and-biases-series-b/
Millions of Ford and Lincoln-branded vehicles will be powered by Android operating system beginning in 2023 as part of a six-year partnership announced Monday that will bring embedded Google apps and services to drivers.
Ford and Google said as part of the partnership they will establish a new collaborative group called Team Upshift that will be used to develop new consumer experiences and services powered by the Android Automotive operating system. The team might create services that will change how customers buy a vehicle, for instance. The companies are also working together to create new business models with data. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian noted that could mean using data to send consumers real-time notices or handle maintenance requests.
The two companies also announced that Ford has chosen Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider.
The partnership marks a reversal for Ford, which has for years attempted to avoid third-party companies like Google and Apple, and instead pushed its open source platform. In 2017, Ford and Toyota Motor even formed a consortium known as SmartDeviceLink Consortium — a reference to an open source software version of Ford’s AppLink. The aim, at the time, was to speed up the deployment of the open source software to give consumers more options in how they connect and control their smartphone apps.
Android Automotive OS shouldn’t be confused with Android Auto, which is a secondary interface that lies on top of an operating system and relies on the user’s smartphone. Android Automotive OS is modeled after its open-source mobile operating system that runs on Linux. But instead of running smartphones and tablets, Google modified it so it could be used in cars.
Ford isn’t the only company with plans to incorporate a version of its Android operating system into its vehicles, although David McClelland, Ford Vice President of Strategy and Partnerships emphasized that the services and offerings would be unique.
For instance, Volvo announced in 2017 that it would use the Android OS and a year later said it would embed voice-controlled Google Assistant, Google Play Store, Google Maps and other Google services into its next-generation Sensus infotainment system. lvo. Polestar, the electric vehicle brand under Volvo, also uses Android Automotive OS to power the infotainment system for its newest vehicle, the Polestar 2.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/ford-vehicles-will-be-powered-by-googles-android-operating-system/
Google and Ford today announced a new partnership around bringing Android Automotive to Ford’s Ford- and Lincoln-branded cars, starting in 2023. But at the same time, the two companies also announced that Ford has chosen Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider.
“With Google Cloud, Ford will digitally transform from the front office to the car to the manufacturing plant floor,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a press conference today. “And there are a number of different applications, including modernizing product development, improving manufacturing and supply chain management, using computer vision AI for employee training, inspection of equipment on the assembly line and other applications.”
Kurian also noted that Google and Ford are working to find new ways to monetize Ford’s data through features like maintenance requests and trade-in alerts.
“At Ford, we’ve got world-class in-house data insights and analytics teams,” David McClelland, Ford’s VP for strategy and partnerships, said. “We’ve recruited significant software expertise and we’re making great progress in this area. And we’re moving rapidly towards commercializing our new self-driving business. And with this news that Thomas [Kurian] and I are announcing today, we’re turbocharging all of that.”
McClelland stressed that Google “brought the entire company to the table for us across cloud, Android, Maps and much more.” It’s maybe also no surprise, given Google’s expertise in this area, that for is looking to leverage Google Cloud’s AI tools as well. This work will go beyond the actual driving experience, too, and include work on modernizing Ford’s product development, manufacturing and supply chain, as well as predictive maintenance in Ford’s plants.
Like other car manufacturers, Ford is also looking to find ways to use the data it collects to create a connection to its drivers that goes beyond the buying experience and (maybe) the occasional maintenance visit to a dealership. For this to work, it needs to be able to understand its customers and offer personalized experiences.
Today’s announcement marks a bit of a turnaround for Ford, which had previously banded together with a group of other car manufacturers with the explicit goal of keeping Google’s role in the automotive industry to a minimum. Now, only a few years later, the two are coming together in one of the deeper partnerships in the industry.
It’s also worth mentioning, that not too long ago, Ford had a deep partnership with Microsoft, which provided the basis of Ford’s Sync technology.
“From the first moving assembly line to the latest driver-assist technology, Ford has set the pace of innovation for the automotive industry for nearly 120 years,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet. “We’re proud to partner to apply the best of Google’s AI, data analytics, compute and cloud
platforms to help transform Ford’s business and build automotive technologies that keep people safe and connected on the road.”
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Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/ford-bets-on-google-cloud-for-its-digital-transformation/
Apple has introduced an iCloud Passwords Chrome extension that will make life easier for those who use both Windows computers and other Apple devices, like a Macbook or an iPhone. The new browser extension lets you access the passwords you saved in Safari on your other Apple devices, then use them within Chrome when you’re on a Windows PC.
You can also save any new passwords you create in Chrome to your iCloud keychain, so it’s synced across your Apple devices.
Image Credits: Apple
Apple didn’t formally announce the new feature, but reports of an iCloud Passwords extension had already been referenced in the release notes of the new iCloud for Windows 10 (ver 12), which arrived at the end of January. After the update, a “Passwords” section appeared in the app designated by the iCloud Keychain logo. This directed users to download the new extension, but the link was broken, as the extension was not yet live.
That changed on Sunday, according a report from 9to5Google, which found the new Chrome add-on had been published to the Chrome Web Store late on Sunday evening. Now, when Windows users access the new Passwords section, the dialog box that prompts the download will properly function.
Once installed, Chrome users on Windows will be able to access any passwords they saved or allowed iCloud Keychain to securely generate for them within Safari for macOS or iOS. Meanwhile, as Windows users create new credentials, these, too, will be synced to their iCloud Keychain so they can later be pulled up on Mac, iPhone, and iPad devices, when needed.
This is the first Chrome extension to support iCloud Keychain on Windows, as before Apple had only offered an iCloud Bookmarks tool for older Windows 7 and 8 PCs, which reached over 7 million users.
Image Credits: Apple
Some users who have tried the extension are reporting problems, but it seems that’s related to their PCs not having been first updated to iCloud for Windows 12.0, which is a prerequisite for the new extension to work.
Though Apple typically locks users into its own platforms, it has slowly expanded some of its services to Windows and even Android, where it makes sense. Today, Apple offers its entertainment apps like Apple Music and Apple TV on other platforms, including Android, and has launched Apple TV on its media player rival, Amazon Fire TV, among others. And 9to5Mac notes that Apple appears to be working to bring Music and Podcasts to the Microsoft Store in the future, as well.
