New OnePlus Buds Z2 images leak, specs confirmed

OnePlus' next budget TWS earbuds, the Buds Z2started in a couple of leaks, and today we get a third one. It doesn't reveal too much we didn't already know, but rather serves as a confirmation that the previous two were on the right track. The most notable upgrade of the Buds Z2 will be the 3 microphones used for active noise reduction and an improved design that handles wind better. The headphones are protected against water and sweat having IP55 certification while the charging box gets IPX4. The buds will support Bluetooth 5.2 but no advanced audio streaming codecs so they will rely...

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GM’s US factories will switch to renewable energy five years ahead of schedule

Steve Dent Contributor

Steve Dent is an associate editor at Engadget.

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Earlier this year, GM announced plans to go green by 2035 with the vehicles it produces and by 2030 with how it produces them. Now, the company has announced that it will be early on the “how” part, using 100 percent renewable energy across its US operations by 2025 — five years ahead of schedule.

To achieve the goal, GM said it would increase energy efficiency and source renewables for its facilities. It also plans to create technology to store renewable energy over the medium and long term and “create microgrids that help deploy renewable energy.”

“We know climate action is a priority and every company must push itself to decarbonize further and faster,” said GM Chief Sustainability Officer Kristen Siemen. “That’s what we are doing by aiming to achieve 100 percent renewable energy five years earlier in the US.”

It also detailed plans to work with a company called PJM Interconnection to track energy usage based on carbon output of the grid at any given time. “When the power being supplied consists mostly of fossil fuels, GM can make informed decisions about tapping into stored renewable energy or reduce the amount of power being consumed,” the company said.

As for the vehicles it produces, GM plans to have 30 EVs globally by 2025, and still plans to “eliminate tailpipe emissions for new light-duty vehicles (i.e., cars, SUVs and pickups) by 2035.” The wording suggests that could include hydrogen-powered cars, though GM appears to be focusing mostly on EVs.

GM’s plans to reduce pollution have drifted with the political winds, however. It was one of several automakers that backed the Trump administration’s planto bar California and other states from setting their own pollution and zero-emission requirements. That would have allowed manufacturers to raise fuel efficiency by just 1.5 percent per year, well below the previous administration’s five percent requirement. GM withdrew from the litigation shortly after Joe Biden was elected President.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Engadget.

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Orchest raises $3.5M to provide a simpler way to build data pipelines

Orchest co-founder and CEO Rick Lamers calls himself, his co-founder Yannick Perrenet and his team “a bunch of data nerds” that love making data tools.

In this case the company is building an open source integrated development environment tool for data scientists so they can develop, iterate and deploy data pipelines without having to rely on an infrastructure or engineering team.

On Friday, the company announced a $3.5 million seed round led by Gradient Ventures and Basis Set Ventures. Joining the round were Seedcamp and Data Council founder Pete Soderling.

“Data scientists get overwhelmed with technology that they have to know,” Lamers told TechCrunch. “They have it the worst: they have a good understanding of mathematics, modeling and what you can say from the data, but they are not as familiar with cloud computing, containerization and the infrastructure side.”

Orchest makes that type of workflow more autonomous so data scientists don’t have to solve those technology issues themselves, but can go from an initial idea to deployment in the same environment, he added.

Orchest’s user interface environment. Image Credits: Orchest

The company, founded in 2020, started out as an open source project on GitHub before running a private beta of clouding hosting. Today is also the debut of the company’s first public version, Lamers said. It has a SaaS business model and offers a version where Orchest takes care of all of the operational hosting and an enterprise version with additional features.

He and Perrenet were studying computer science at Delft University of Technology and dropped out to start the company. They were already coding open source software and were racking up a large amount of GitHub stars in a short period of time when investors began reaching out, Lamers recalls.

Orchest already has over 1,300 stars, and over 150 companies signed up for the private beta. It saw over 2,500 unique installs of the open source software, including from organizations like Accenture and Georgetown University.

Chang Xu, partner at Basis Set, met Lamers and Perrenet early in 2020 and recalls them standing out as “exceptional founders,” and ended up participating in the company’s pre-seed round at the end of 2020.

Xu’s area of expertise is early-stage B2B infrastructure and developer tools. She said that software engineers often have many tools at their disposal, but data scientists don’t. They may learn how to use certain resources, like Jupyter Notebooks or Google Colab, during their education, but once they have a job and are out there manipulating the data, they realize they don’t have the software engineering prowess.

“Rick and Yannick were telling us that once data scientists get to companies they don’t know how to apply what they have used, and companies don’t have the money to staff a full engineering team, so there is white space in the tools there,” she said. “Orchest enables data scientists to self-serve what they need and can just use it.”

How to ensure data quality in the era of big data

 

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All Day Kitchens wants to expand every independent restaurant’s delivery network

The pandemic ushered in the popularity of shared workspaces, known as cloud kitchens or ghost kitchens, for restaurants to cook meals exclusively for delivery.

But for small, independent restaurants that couldn’t afford the upfront costs for expansion, Uber Eats alums Ken Chong and Matt Sawchuk came up with another approach. They founded All Day Kitchens in 2018 to partner with restaurants to share their food across a city through use of a network of satellite kitchens, without having to put up any upfront costs.

With their model, distributed kitchens are situated in residential and business areas, closer to customers. When a new restaurant is onboarded to the platform, their food goes to all locations, which streamlines how restaurants expand in large geographies and delivery zones, CEO Chong told TechCrunch. The model also enables the ability for customers to order from multiple restaurants in one order and it will all be delivered together.

All Day Kitchens founders Ken Chong and Matt Sawchuk

“Consumer preference was spoken for pre-COVID and the entire restaurant world was not going to be the right model for how digital demand was to be filled,” he added. “We set out to build a turn key solution for restaurants for which warehouse ghost kitchens were not working for them. Instead, we built a platform for micro-fulfillment so they could expand their reach.”

On Friday, the food tech and logistics company announced a $65 million Series C round of financing led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from GIC to fund expansion into new markets, R&D and hiring. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures and Base10 also participated in the round along with new investors, including Tishman Speyer, Lime CEO Wayne Ting and Forward co-founders Adrian Aoun and Ilya Abyzov.

The new investment brings All Day Kitchens’ total funding to date to $102.5 million. It is the latest company in the ghost kitchen space to receive funding in a hot industry that includes Muy, JustKitchen and even robotic kitchens like YPC.

The company doubled the number of satellite kitchens in its network this year and now operates more than 15 locations throughout the Bay Area and Chicago, with new markets expected to go into Texas and Southern California next year, Chong said. It is also hiring at its headquarters in San Francisco and as it opens the new markets.

Though the global pandemic was a tough environment for its restaurant partners, All Day Kitchens saw the number of partners joining the platform grow by four times over the past year. It is working with brands like Honey Butter Fried Chicken, Mott St and HaiSous. It’s revenue has also increased 18 times over the past 18 months.

“The part that we honestly found surprising and striking is the misconception that restaurants are late adopters,” Chong said. “Similar to Uber, it is really that no one was building something like this for them. A lot of the apps out there are for consumers, and that is why restaurants are our focus. The restaurant partners we work with are always looking to improve.”

In the heated cloud kitchens race, Kitchen United aims to kill with kindness; here’s its playbook

As part of the investment, Alex Taussig, partner at Lightspeed, is joining the company’s board as a director and GIC’s Jeremy Kranz is joining as a board observer.

Taussig met Chong over a year ago and said Lightspeed has made a number of investments in the food and commerce space over the past decade. One of the areas Taussig was looking into was ways to solve the demand for delivery. He recalls looking at different startups and models and was “underwhelmed” by the warehouse models.

In talking to Chong about All Day Kitchens, Taussig saw something different: a model where the focus was getting the food closer to the customer. It not only correlated with the quality of food, but also delivery times so that items weren’t sitting in someone’s car for an hour. As a result, there would be higher utilization of the platform, he said.

“I was blown away by that insight and spent a year watching Ken build the company,” Taussig added. “The Chicago launch was also a big deal because most companies start in the Bay Area. This market size is measured in billions and is almost limitless and faster growing on the independent side. It is going to be hard for another company to come in and do what All Day Kitchens is already doing.”

10 proptech investors see better era for residential and retail after pandemic

 

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LeadIQ’s rapid growth snags venture attention as sales software market stays hot

This morning LeadIQ, a startup working in the sales software market, announced that it has closed a $30 million Series B led by Cathay Innovation. Other investors in the transaction include Fresco Capital, Strong Ventures, and Eight Road Ventures.

LeadIQ frames its product from the perspective of missed revenue targets at companies, which it claims impact nearly two-thirds of today’s deals. The startup’s service is designed to save sales staff time by taking on the brunt of data entry work from the sales prospecting process by automating lead capture. The LeadIQ product also includes analytics covering a customer’s prospecting efficiency, which can then be segmented by worker performance and more general breakdowns like industry and company size.

Previously, LeadIQ raised around $12 million, though the company told TechCrunch that it had only spent $6 million of that total, despite reaching eight-figure ARR (the $10 million threshold).

Why raise more capital if it didn’t need the funds? According to CEO and co-founder Mei Siauw, LeadIQ is moving towards supporting account management instead of merely lead management. Building new products is expensive, and thus more capital will help the company staff up for the work.

Why work towards sales account management over simply focusing on leads? According to Siauw, the effort will help sales teams better work with marketing teams, allowing for more complete information sharing and hopefully better sales results. The CEO likened marketing as similar to fishing with a net. Sales, she said, is more akin to hunting fish with a spear. With account-level tooling leading to more complete information sharing, she hopes to give sales teams a better shot at catching more fish, to extend the analogy.

The company has been efficient to date, as noted above. Frugality, however, is only a virtue in startup-land when it is coupled to rapid growth. LeadIQ hits that mark, having grown its annual recurring revenue (ARR) by around 3x in the last year. The company also sports net retention figures of around 125%, and a strong ratio of account size versus customer acquisition costs. Those are the sorts of metrics that SaaS investors covet.

The LeadIQ round is another datapoint in our understanding of the current market for sales-focused software. It appears to be an active sector with fellow sales software service Gongo.io raising rapid-fire rounds in recent quarters including a $250 million investment earlier this year, and a $200 million check in August of 2020. Gong works in what it calls “the revenue intelligence” market when it raised this June.

The sales software market has also seen exits recently including a $575 million deal between ZoomInfo and the smaller Chorus.ai. Chorus had posted rapid revenue growth ahead of its exit, raising north of $100 million before it sold to the larger company.

LeadIQ has around 115 employes, its CEO said, a number that it intends to double in the next 18 months or so. Today those workers hail from 22 countries, making LeadIQ the epitome of the now-standard micro-multinational model that many early-stage startups are pursuing. Notably LeadIQ has two main hubs, one in the United States and one in Singapore. Siauw says that Europe may be nextLe.

Now flush with more funds than ever, let’s see how quickly LeadIQ can expand its revenues in the next year. That next milestone should help us understand both if the company will become an IPO candidate, and how deep its market truly is.

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Battery chemistry company Sila’s founder Gene Berdichevsky on the science of scaling up

Before Gene Berdichevsky became the co-founder and CEO of battery chemistry company Sila Nano, he was the seventh employee at Tesla Motors. As principal engineer on the Roadster battery, Berdichevsky was one of the first people crazy enough to experiment with shoving a lithium-ion battery pack into a combustion engine vehicle. The result? The Roadster became the first highway legal serial production all-electric car fueled by lithium-ion battery cells and able to travel over 200 miles per charge.

In 2011, Sila was founded with a mission of not only building the next generation of battery chemistry, but also being able to scale it. Since then, the company has figured out how to replace the graphite in the anode of a lithium-ion cell with silicon, which Berdichevsky says makes for a denser, cheaper battery cell. He explains why:

There are four key components in a battery. The anode stores lithium when the batteries charge. The cathode stores lithium when the battery is discharged, and the lithium goes back and forth between charge and discharge, moving through an electrolyte liquid. The separator keeps them from short-circuiting.

For the last 30 years, the anode has been graphite, and that material in graphite requires a ring of six carbon atoms for one lithium atom to come and sit in the middle when the battery is charging. So it takes six carbon atoms to store one lithium atom. In silicon, you can have one silicon atom bonding with four lithium atoms. So instead of six to one, you’re one to four. You literally have 42x atomic advantage with silicon, which means you can use a lot less material to store the same amount of lithium. Essentially, you’re using a lot less material in a much smaller space to store your energy, the lithium, in the anode.

Sila’s first commercial product, released in September on the newest Whoop fitness tracker wearable, proves not only that the company’s recipe works, but that it can scale — the launch also marks Sila’s 10-year anniversary. The next step is scaling up 100x to put the same chemistry in automobiles.

The company already has joint battery ventures with BMW and Daimler and aims to provide battery chemistry for electric vehicles at scale by 2025. With nearly every major automaker promising new lineups of EVs, ensuring a sustainable and affordable battery pack is of the utmost importance.

As a battery technology pioneer, Berdichevsky is playing the long game, already thinking in terms of the next few decades worth of work, not just the next few years. He talks us through his long-term strategy, his thoughts on fundraising and his insights into the battery industry.

The following interview, part of an ongoing series with founders who are building transportation companies, has been edited for length and clarity.

What is Sila’s long-term vision? 

We want to be a world leader and do for the energy storage industry what Intel did for the personal computing industry. Intel didn’t make every single chip or the motherboards or the PCs. They made the most important components whose performance drove the adoption of the devices people actually wanted, and the better the microprocessor got, the better computers got, the more people used them and the more the world changed.

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Honor's foldable Magic X to be released in Q4

According to noted Chinese tipster Honor is about to release its first foldable phone before the end of Q4 this year and will allegedly be similar to Huawei's Mate X2 as the development strated before the separation of the two companies. The device is internally known as Magic X, but it's not certain if that will be its final marketing name. Previously Honor's CEO George Zhao revealed his company is working on a foldable phone and believed it will be the best one in the industry. Seeing how great the Mate X2 is and how Honor isn't limited by the sanctions imposed on Huawei we wouldn't...

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