According to a recent Marketers Media report, the global helpdesk automation market is estimated to grow 33% annually to $11 billion by 2023. Earlier this month, Zendesk (NYSE: ZEN), a leading player...
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Adam Robinson: After hiring agencies to try do Facebook marketing, none of them worked because our product wasn’t good enough. It was only good enough for this uncompetitive channel. We had to do...
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It’s generally agreed that Higher Education in the United States has gradually become more and more unaffordable. Students are dependent on external financial resources for which many of them do not even qualify. Students that are able to secure a loan, often have to take on debts they can’t really afford. And if they don’t eventually land a job with enough income, they are saddled with debt for a very long time.
Much of the problem is that most student loan companies are not concerned with the overall financial well-being of their students, who often feel stuck, trying to repay a loan they cannot afford, without a backup organization that will help them figure it all out. We can see that in the figures. The student loan debt in the US has just reached $1.6 trillion dollars and more than quadrupled in the last 15 years.
With the student debt crisis getting out of hand, the topic has become a semi-permanent issue in the news.
Launching next week is a new startup under the Ycombinator accelerator called Blair which aims to address this seemingly intractable problem.
Blair finances college students through what’s called “Income Share Agreements” (ISA). Students receive funding for their tuition or costs of living and in turn pay back a percentage of their income for a fixed period of time after they graduate. Repayments adjust to individual income circumstances and by deferring payments in times of low income we protect the downside of the students.
It thus provides students with an alternative to debt which is tailored to their individual circumstances to ensure affordability. Blair’s underwriting process is based on the future potential of a student and not their credit score or co-signer, which could be a deal-breaker in traditional settings. Blair’s competitors are traditional student lenders: Sallie Mae, Sofi, Earnest, Wells Fargo, Citizen Bank, other banks. ISA companies include Vemo Education, Leif, Almapact, Lumni and Defynance.
In contrast to traditional student loan companies, Blair relies on being more aligned with the financial incentives of students, the idea being that it supports students in improving their employability by placing them in internships early, giving them access to industry mentors and coaching them individually on their career prospects.
The founders came up with the idea from personal experience. Constantin, one of the co-founders, is on an ISA himself, as are a lot of the company’s friends. They stumbled across the problem of student debt over and over again while studying in the US and noticed a stark difference between their friends in the US and their friends in Germany. The main reason is that 40% of the students at their alma maters in Germany use Income Share Agreements to finance their studies. They plan to use their experience from Europe and make ISAs more widespread in the US.
Students apply for funding on the website, and within minutes and get a personal quote shortly after. If they accept the quote, they receive their funding within a couple of days which they can use to pay for their tuition or cost of living. Once Blair issues the funding, it crafts a holistic career plan for each individual student and starts supporting them in landing the internships and jobs they want. This includes, for example, optimizing their application documents, preparing them for interviews or connecting them to mentors in their target industry. For context, they batch students together in funds and let external investors invest in the funds.
It receives a cut of the student repayments and carried interest if a student fund performs better than the target return. Additionally, it partners with companies that hire talent through the platform.
Blair has raised the first fund for 50 students and disbursed money for the first ten. The rest of the students will receive their money within the next weeks. After YC’s Demo Day the company will deploy a larger fund that will support 200 additional students.
“Our underwriting model is unique since we have based it on data from concluded ISA funds in European countries,” says cofounder Mike Mahlkow.
“In the last two weeks, we received applications for funding totaling over 4 million dollars. Many of our students come from underprivileged backgrounds, often without any support network. Our goal is to build a human capital platform where individuals can access capital based on their future potential instead of their past and investors can participate in the upside potential of individuals in an ethical way” he adds.
Hey hackathon fans, get ready to pack your bags and book your tickets to Berlin. That’s right, baby, the TC Hackathon returns to Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. We’re looking for creative code warriors of every stripe to compete in a grueling, exhilarating marathon that will test your physical, mental and technical limits.
It won’t cost you a thing to apply or to participate. Heck, we even give you a free Innovator pass to attend. Don’t wait on this opportunity — we’re limiting participation to 500 hackers. Apply to the TC Disrupt Berlin Hackathon 2019, compete against some of the best coders and makers in the world and let your freaky hack flag fly.
TechCrunch vets all applicants and if you make the cut, you’ll join a team (or bring one of your own) and spend the next 36 hours designing, coding and creating something new and amazing.
Curious about these sponsored contests? We’ll roll out specifics on sponsors, challenges and prizes over the next few weeks. In the meantime, check out the sponsored contests, prizes and winners from last year’s Disrupt SF 2018 Hackathon. That’ll give you a sense of the kind of projects to expect.
Once the hack clock runs out and you’ve submitted your creation, a team of experts will judge all completed projects in a science-fair style format and select 10 finalists. On day two, those 10 teams will have two minutes to present and pitch their project on the Extra Crunch Stage. No pressure…just kidding. Lots of pressure.
Sponsors will announce the winners of their individual challenges — which come with cash prizes and other incentives. Then TechCrunch will select the best overall hack — and award that team a $5,000 cash prize.
And don’t worry — we’ll keep you fed, watered and caffeinated throughout the event. You’re gonna need all the energy you can muster.
Competing in the TC Hackathon is fast-paced, exhausting and fun. It’s also a great way to network, impress potential employers or meet your next collaborator. Space is limited and seats will go quickly, so apply to the TC Hackathon at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. Show us your hack!
Veganism is growing worldwide and now is the time to help it to the next level, according to community startup VeganNation.
The Israel-based company has just raised $10 million in funding for its community app platform and to prep for its ICO later this year. The funding comes mostly from private investors with commitments of between $25,000 to $1.2 million.
The company's VeganCoin is based on an ethereum blockchain and is set to be classified as a utility token. VeganNation's CEO, Isaac Thomas, told Business Insider that the ICO would happen in late October before the currency goes live in November this year.
"Veganism is a massive financial opportunity," Thomas told Business Insider in an interview. "Our platform will be an accessible meeting place for vegans with our currency helping to power the vegan economy within a global community."
VeganNation claims to have around 3000 businesses on board as partners for when its app and currency are ready. Thomas told Business Insider that the company was in active discussions with VCs for future raises subsequent to its ICO.
The company recently added Game of Thrones star Jerome Flynn (Bronn) and Step Up dancer Jenna Dewan to its advisory board. VeganNation has also partnered with four Brazilian soccer teams to work together on environmental projects to protect the Amazon rainforest.
"VeganNation is the basis of an international vegan economy that makes vegan lives simpler, more economically and better for the Earth and the soul of each of us," Flynn said in a blog post. "VeganCoin will allow many more to become vegans and thereby contribute to our ecological footprint."
Check out the company's 17 slide pitch deck below:
WeWork CEO Adam Neumann. Getty
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Thursday.
WeWork filed to go public on Wednesday, revealing spiraling losses and billions of dollars in lease commitments. The firm lost $1.8 billion in 2018, and $690 million in the first half of 2019. WeWork is going public with a weird corporate structure that would give tax benefits to early insiders but not to those who buy in later. WeWork confirmed in its S-1 filing that it has adopted something similar to the so-called "Up-C" structure, where investors can only buy into a holding company which in turns holds a stake in WeWork's core business. Over 500 Googlers are urging their company not to bid on a cloud-computing contract with the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in what's the latest in a series of employee protests at the Silicon Valley tech giant. The CBP contractâ which seeks to "acquire services from a Cloud Services Provider" â has sparked controversy amongst Google's rank-and-file due to the agency's recent handling of migrants at the US southern border. Huawei technicians reportedly helped the Ugandan and Zambian governments spy on their political opponents, leading to their arrest. In Kampala, Uganda, Huawei employees reportedly helped Uganda's cyber-surveillance unit break into the WhatsApp group belonging to Bobi Wine, a political opponent to the current Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi held an all-hands meeting on Tuesday, and the big topic under discussion was cost cutting. Khosrowshahi told employees on Tuesday that he was looking at ways to trim expenses, and said he was eliminating Uber's tradition of "anniversary balloons" to save around $250,000. Capital One data breach suspect Paige A. Thompson, of Seattle, may have stolen data from "more than 30 companies, educational institutions, and other entities," according to prosecutors. Thompson was charged with count of computer fraud and abuse (though prosecutors say more counts could be filed), after an FBI investigation alleged she stole data impacting roughly 100 million Capital One customers in the US and around 6 million in Canada. SoftBank has invested $110 million in a startup trying to solve a big problem in renewable energy with a giant brick-lifting crane. The firm has backed Energy Vault, which says it has come up with a solution to long-term energy storage. Congress is demanding that 8chan owner Jim Watkins testify over his site's involvement in recent mass shootings. On Wednesday, 8chan owner Jim Watkins was sent a subpoena to appear before the House Committee on September 5 at 9:30 a.m. ET. Amazon is making a big push to help third-party sellers donate their unsold products instead of trashing them. The firm is launching a new program that allows third-party sellers to donate their excess and returned goods. Tech CEO Scott Borgerson who, according to the Daily Mail has been dating and housing Jeffrey Epstein's alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell, denied in a conversation with Business Insider that his "former friend" Maxwell is staying at his home. When contacted by Business Insider, Borgerson said he's been out of the country traveling for the past week, during which no one has been living at his home.Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.
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Eden Farm is a startup with the ambitious goal of building a food distribution network for Indonesia, where many restaurants currently rely on markets for fresh ingredients.
But this means high markups and unreliable supplies for restaurant owners and lower profits for farmers, co-founder and CEO David Gunawan tells TechCrunch. The company, part of Y Combinator’s current batch, wants to help both by simplifying the supply chain, ensuring stable pricing and reducing food waste. Eden Farm currently focuses on fresh produce and non-perishable items, but plans to expand its product line to meat and seafood, too.
The company launched in 2017 and now supplies produce from 60 farmers to more than 200 restaurants in six major cities: Jakarta, Tangerang, South Tangerang, Bekasi, Depok and Bogor. Eden Farm is currently raising an oversubscribed seed round. Gunawan says the target was originally intended to be $1 million, but has now increased to $1.75 million. Investors include Y Combinator and Everhaus.
Eden Farm started as a farm, but while talking to other farmers and researching the agricultural market, its founders realized there were many problems with food distribution in Indonesia.
“Every restaurant in Indonesia faces a huge problem with supply, stability and extreme price volatility,” Gunawan says. “Fruit and vegetable prices can go up and down around 30% to 50% every day. In peak season, for certain commodities, prices can go up ten times, like chilis in the summer.”
Eden Farm tackles the problem of supply and demand with a mobile app that gives demand forecasts to farmers so they can plan their next harvests. Traditionally, farmers don’t sell produce directly to restaurants, Gunawan says. Instead, their harvest goes through several layers of middlemen before arriving at markets.
Eden Farm is able to ensure price stability and also allow farmers to make more profit by purchasing produce wholesale from them. On the demand side, Eden Farm’s value proposition includes quality control. Before produce is delivered to restaurants, it is inspected and washed. Gunawan says restaurants typically have to dispose around 30% of the produce they purchase from markets, but Eden Farm has a 100% guarantee and will refund the price of any produce that is unusable. It also partners with two large markets in Jakarta to help supply large quantities of vegetables and ensure there are enough supplies during peak season. Gunawan says Eden Farm’s quality control can help save restaurants up to 50%.
Eden Farm wants to build a network similar to Sysco, the American food distribution giant, but it has to solve several problems unique to Indonesia.
“We are serving a very traditional industry. Farmers already have their own way of planting and their own culture, which has lasted for generations, and we’re trying to change that,” says Gunawan. “At first we didn’t know how to talk to them, how to convince them, but we learned a lot about how to pay respect to farmers. Every time we go to a village, for example, we know how to present, who to pay respects to, like the elders there. We have to do that before the elders will introduce us to the farmers in the area.”
The company currently handles about half of its deliveries in-house and uses third-party logistics providers for the rest. Most produce is sourced from farms close to where it is sold so it can be delivered in less than 24 hours, but Eden Farms goes further for some vegetables. For example, potatoes are purchased from farms in Central Java, while carrots come from North Sumatra.
Eden Farm works mostly with small, traditional farms, but it also carries produce like lettuce and kale from hydroponic farms. After finishing Y Combinator, Gunawan says the startup will begin focusing on expanding into five new cities: Bandung, Surabaya, Bali, Medan and Malang. As its order volumes increase, the company will begin focusing on smaller markets and once it hits 25,000 restaurants, expand into meat and seafood.
Capital One data breach suspect Paige A. Thompson, of Seattle, may have stolen data from "more than 30 companies, educational institutions, and other entities," according to prosecutors.
Thompson was charged by the US Attorney's Office in Seattle with count of computer fraud and abuse (though prosecutors say more counts could be filed). A FBI investigation alleges she stole data impacting roughly 100 million Capital One customers in the US and around 6 million in Canada.
The fact that other organizations may have had data stolen was revealed in an August 13 court filing, supporting prosecutors' wish to keep Thompson detained pending trial.
"Thompson intruded into servers operated, rented, or contracted by over 30 companies, educational institutions, and other entities," prosecutors allege in the court document. "Although not all of those intrusions involved the theft of personal identifying information, it appears likely that a number of the intrusions did."
Investigators are still working to determine the identities of the organizations that may have been impacted by the theft.
Thompson, according to prosecutors, has said she did not disseminate the data "from Capital One or any other victim" and that her server was the only copy. Investigators have yet to confirm that the data was not shared, but note that "To date, however, the government has not uncovered any evidence that would suggest Thompson's statement that she neither sold, nor otherwise disseminated, any of the data beyond the servers that the government recovered is untrue."
Beyond revealing the alleged additional theft, the court documents claim that Thompson is a flight risk, a danger to herself and others, and could cause technological harm â noting previous encounters with police, threats to harm others or herself, and access to firearms. Business Insider could not immediately reach an attorney representing Thompson.
Capital One made the breach public on July 29, saying that personal information from credit card applicants between 2005 and early 2019 was stolen â such as "names, addresses, zip codes/postal codes, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and self-reported income." Roughly 140,000 US social security numbers, 80,000 credit card numbers, and around 1 million Canadian social insurance numbers may also have been compromised. (To find out if your data was compromised, keep an eye on your mailbox. Capital One will be sending out letters to those affected.)
The breach has led to increased scrutiny of security measures taken to personal information is stored.
Camping has already gotten a makeover to become Glamping. Now it's getting celebrity investors.
On Tuesday, Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter and Will Smith announced they were backing campsite booking startup Hipcamp. The startup had officially announced its $25 million Series B on July 24.
The two rappers-turned-entrepreneurs backed the buzzy startup, commonly referred to as the Airbnb for camping, through their respective venture capital funds Marcy Venture Partners and Dreamers Fund. The specific contribution amounts were not disclosed.
Andreessen Horowitz led Hipcamp's July Series B that valued the company at $127 million, according to Pitchbook data. The startup has raised $41.6 million in venture funding since 2013.
Hipcamp's mission, according to a recent Forbes report, is to get more people outside, and offers its users a wide selection of camping, glamping, and RV options on private property, along with real-time availability and review data for federal lands like national parks. Forbes reported that the company is hoping to add listings for campgrounds at state parks in the future.
The investment from Carter and Smith comes as camping has skyrocketed in popularity with younger people looking to escape the deluge of technology in their everyday lives. But a myth persists that people of color, and specifically young black millennials, have avoided outdoor recreation.
"For a long time, being "outdoorsy" meant you fit a very specific mold," Hipcamp founder and CEO Alyssa Ravasio wrote in a blog post announcing the news. "Thankfully, that's changing."
WeWork would like potential investors to think of it as a tech firm.
But its numbers tell a different story. No matter if you look at WeWork's revenue and expenses, its assets, or just its cash flow, it looks far more like a real-estate company than a typical tech firm.
The distinction is more than just semantic. The company's valuation in the public markets will be in large part determined by how investors classify it. They tend to be willing to pay a much steeper premium for tech companies than for real-estate firms.
WeWork, or rather the We Company, its corporate parent, certainly pitched itself as a tech firm in the initial public offering paperwork that it released on Wednesday. The document mentions "technology" 93 times, many of them in connection with its business offerings or investments.
Read this: WeWork files for IPO, revealing spiraling losses of $1.6 billion
"We offer a space-as-a-service model that we operationalize by using a global-local playbook powered by technology," We Company said in the part of its IPO filing where it describes its business.
To date, its venture and other investors have bought that line, valuing WeWork like a tech company. With a $47 billion valuation in the private markets, it's worth more than 15 times its annualized sales for this year, a relatively steep valuation considering it has consistently posted losses.
But public investors may have a different take. That's because, as its IPO paperwork makes clear, it's not really in the technology business, no matter how many times it tries to wrap itself in that mantle.
Here's what its financial numbers show:
NetApp CEO George Kurian had reason to be upbeat on Wednesday when his company reported quarterly results that cheered Wall Street, sparking a late rally in the tech company's shares.
But while the report beat expectations, and Kurian could point to signs that the data-storage company was adapting to a changing enterprise market, he also warned of a hazy road ahead.
Major enterprises had grown more cautious on IT spending amid growing economic uncertainty, which has been aggravated by the US-China trade war.
"We have taken a variety of difficult scenarios into account," Kurian told Business Insider in an interview. "I don't want to predict the worst-case outcomes, but we have taken a variety of difficult outcomes into account."
A key concern is still the raging trade dispute between the US and China, which escalated recently when the Trump administration said it would impose a new round of tariffs on Chinese goods.
"Customers, especially large global enterprises, continue to be a bit cautious about making large capital investments, given the uncertainty about the trade and global economic outlook," he said. "The sooner there's clarity on what would be the potential resolution of the trade regime, as well as clarity in terms of the economic outlook, people can make spending decisions and move forward."
For the current quarter, NetApp said it expected adjusted income of 91 cents to 99 cents a share on revenue in the range of $1.33 billion to $1.48 billion. That's stronger than the average analyst expectation, which called for earnings per share of 90 cents on revenue of $1.35 billion.
But NetApp didn't have a very high bar to clear, given the lackluster expectations surrounding its business in the current climate.
NetApp makes networking equipment used for private data centers and the cloud. Its business is especially vulnerable to the bumps and jolts of enterprise-tech spending, which has been hurt by worries that the trade war could cause an economic downturn.
Despite the tweet diplomacy between Trump and Beijing over everything from tariffs to currency rates, Kurian doesn't expect the situation to be resolved in the coming months. "We don't expect normalization of the trade regime this calendar year and that is factored into our calculations," he said.
Kurian, whose identical twin brother, Thomas, is the CEO of Google Cloud, has been in the top job at NetApp since 2015.
NetApp's results were better than expected, and the company's stock rallied 4% to $46.50 in after-hours trading. The shares are still down more than 30% this year.
NetApp reported fiscal first-quarter income of $103 million, or 42 cents a share, compared with a profit of $283 million, or $1.05 a share for the year-ago quarter. Revenue fell to $1.24 billion from $1.47 billion. Adjusted income was 65 cents a share. Analysts expected NetApp to report earnings of 61 cents a share on revenue of $1.24 billion.
Got a tip about NetApp or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at
Shares of Cisco fell sharply on Wednesday after the tech giant posted a weaker-than-expected forecast as CEO Chuck Robbins pointed to growing market uncertainty and the impact of the US-China trade war.
"We definitely saw a significant impact on our business in China as it relates to what's going on with the trade war," he told analysts during Cisco's earnings call.
Cisco shares dropped about 8% to $46.60 in late trades as Wall Street reacted to the company's disappointing outlook.
Cisco reported a fiscal fourth quarter profit of $2.2 billion, or 51 cents a share, compared with a profit of $3.8 billion, or 81 cents a share, for the year-ago quarter. Revenue rose 5% to $13.4 billion. Adjusted income was 83 cents a share.
Analysts were expecting Cisco to report earnings of 82 cents a share on revenue of $13.39 billion. So profit was a slight beat and revenue was in line.
But the rub came when Cisco said it expected earnings of 80 to 82 cents a share for the current quarter. Analysts were expecting earnings of 83 cents a share.
One reason for the lower-the expected forecast is escalating trade tensions between the US and China after the Trump administration said it would impose more tariffs on Chinese products.
Robbins said Cisco's business in China is "a small part of our business ... but when it falls very dramatically, it can still have some impact," he said.
Cisco is a leading maker of networking equipment. Robbins said the company continued to see challenges in the service-provider market, which is the one area where it has traditionally struggled.
But he also pointed to signs of weak demand in the enterprise-tech market, the area where Cisco dominates, which other tech companies, such as NetApp, also cited recently.
"We did see in July an early indication of macro shifts that we didn't see in the prior quarter," Robbins said. "We're monitoring this and watching it."
Got a tip about Cisco or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at
The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is normally quiet, but in May it surprised astronomers with an unprecedented explosion of infrared light.
The closest supermassive black hole to Earth, called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, suddenly got 75 times brighter than normal along the near-infrared region of the light spectrum for two hours on May 13, a team of scientists has found.
According to a new paper they published on August 5 in arXiv, a Cornell University repository for scientific papers that are not yet peer reviewed, this was the brightest flash scientists had seen in 20 years of observing the black hole â and twice as bright as any previously recorded.
"The black hole was so bright I at first mistook it for the star S0-2, because I had never seen Sgr A* that bright," Tuan Do, an astronomer and lead author of the paper, told ScienceAlert. "I knew almost right away there was probably something interesting going on with the black hole."
The new findings "push the limits of the current statistical models," since those don't account for infrared flux levels this high, and suggest scientists' understanding of our galaxy's central black hole is not up-to-date, the team wrote in the paper.
The Milky Way's spiral centers around a supermassive black hole. Scientists think that every galaxy has one at its center. NASA/JPL-Caltech
Scientists think every galaxy has an especially dense "supermassive" black hole at its center. The proximity of Sgr A* makes it the easiest black hole for scientists to study. The team that discovered this unprecedented flare-up observed Sgr A* for four nights with an infrared camera at the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
They were hoping to test Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity by observing how the black hole warped a nearby star's light. They got what they came for, plus the unprecedented infrared flare.
Do tweeted a time lapse of the event on Saturday.
For three of the four nights of observation, the black hole was in "a clearly elevated state," Do's team wrote.
"We think that something unusual might be happening this year because the black hole seems to vary in brightness more, reaching brighter levels than we've ever seen in the past," Do told Vice.
But the researchers aren't sure what exactly is going on.
In black holes, matter gets packed into a tiny space, giving them extremely powerful gravity â Sgr A*, for example, has the mass of 4 million suns. The pull of a black hole is so strong that even light cannot escape, so researchers have to observe the infrared or X-ray light that radiates out from the black hole and interacts with nearby gas and stars.
The researchers think such an interaction could have caused this bright flash. Specifically, they said, an interaction with a nearby star that passed near Sgr A* in 2018 could have disturbed gas flows at the edge of the black hole's grasp.
They also pointed to a dust cloud that passed near Sgr A* in 2014 but didn't get dramatically torn apart the way astronomers thought it would. The brightness could be a "delayed reaction," they wrote.
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory captured an unprecedented X-ray flare from Sagittarius A* in 2013. This event was 400 times brighter than the usual X-ray output from the black hole.NASA/CXC/Northwestern Univ/D.Haggard et al.
In 2013, scientists detected an equally mysterious X-ray flare-up from Sgr A*, which was 400 times brighter than its normal levels of X-ray radiation.
Scientists should continue monitoring Sgr A* to see if it's experiencing significant changes, Do's team wrote. More research could also be used to update models of the regular flux of the black hole's radiation levels.
"Many astronomers are observing Sgr A* this summer," Do told Vice. "I'm hoping we can get as much data as we can this year before the region of the sky with Sgr A* gets behind the sun and we won't be able to observe it again until next year."
WeWork just dropped the paperwork for its IPO.
That means, we now have a chance to take a closer look at the company's finances, including which investors own the largest stakes.
The We Company, as WeWork's corporate parent is known, has many more private investors than its new S-1 filing reveals and some of them have already cashed out and done well. Insiders have sold billions of dollars of We Co. stock in so-called secondary transactions â in which shareholders privately sell their stock directly to investors â according to Pitchbook, the database that tracks such records.
For instance, shareholders sold $1.3 billion to Softbank in August, 2017, in addition to the $1.7 billion Softbank spent on shares issued by the company. In January, Softbank bought another $1 billion of shares from existing shareholders, as well, Pitchbook says.
The company hasn't yet disclosed the price it plans to sell shares. So it's not possible to know (or even guess) how much each person's stake is worth at this time.
Still, in 2017, when WeWork raised $1.7 billion (and had raised $3.4 billion to date) which valued the company at $21 billion, investors bought in at $57.90 per share, according to Pitchbook.
So, just for the sheer fun of it, we calculated the value of all classes of shares at $58.
We'll learn the true value of each stake when the company prices its shares right before they begin to trade, and we'll update this article at that time.
Imagine a moving tower made of huge cement bricks weighing 35 metric tons. The movement of these massive blocks is powered by wind or solar power plants and is a way to store the energy those plants generate. Software controls the movement of the blocks automatically, responding to changes in power availability across an electric grid to charge and discharge the power that’s being generated.
The development of this technology is the culmination of years of work at Idealab, the Pasadena, Calif.-based startup incubator, and Energy Vault, the company it spun out to commercialize the technology, has just raised $110 million from SoftBank Vision Fund to take its next steps in the world.
Energy storage remains one of the largest obstacles to the large-scale rollout of renewable energy technologies on utility grids, but utilities, development agencies and private companies are investing billions to bring new energy storage capabilities to market as the technology to store energy improves.
The investment in Energy Vault is just one indicator of the massive market that investors see coming as power companies spend billions on renewables and storage. As The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend, ScottishPower, the U.K.-based utility, is committing to spending $7.2 billion on renewable energy, grid upgrades and storage technologies between 2018 and 2022.
Meanwhile, out in the wilds of Utah, the American subsidiary of Japan’s Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems is working on a joint venture that would create the world’s largest clean energy storage facility. That 1 gigawatt storage would go a long way toward providing renewable power to the Western U.S. power grid and is going to be based on compressed air energy storage, large flow batteries, solid oxide fuel cells and renewable hydrogen storage.
“For 20 years, we’ve been reducing carbon emissions of the U.S. power grid using natural gas in combination with renewable power to replace retiring coal-fired power generation. In California and other states in the western United States, which will soon have retired all of their coal-fired power generation, we need the next step in decarbonization. Mixing natural gas and storage, and eventually using 100% renewable storage, is that next step,” said Paul Browning, president and CEO of MHPS Americas.
Energy Vault’s technology could also be used in these kinds of remote locations, according to chief executive Robert Piconi.
Energy Vault’s storage technology certainly isn’t going to be ubiquitous in highly populated areas, but the company’s towers of blocks can work well in remote locations and have a lower cost than chemical storage options, Piconi said.
“What you’re seeing there on some of the battery side is the need in the market for a mobile solution that isn’t tied to topography,” Piconi said. “We obviously aren’t putting these systems in urban areas or the middle of cities.”
For areas that need larger-scale storage that’s a bit more flexible there are storage solutions like Tesla’s new Megapack.
The Megapack comes fully assembled — including battery modules, bi-directional inverters, a thermal management system, an AC breaker and controls — and can store up to 3 megawatt-hours of energy with a 1.5 megawatt inverter capacity.
The Energy Vault storage system is made for much, much larger storage capacity. Each tower can store between 20 and 80 megawatt hours at a cost of 6 cents per kilowatt hour (on a levelized cost basis), according to Piconi.
The first facility that Energy Vault is developing is a 35 megawatt-hour system in Northern Italy, and there are other undisclosed contracts with an undisclosed number of customers on four continents, according to the company.
One place where Piconi sees particular applicability for Energy Vault’s technology is around desalination plants in places like sub-Saharan Africa or desert areas.
Backing Energy Vault’s new storage technology are a clutch of investors, including Neotribe Ventures, Cemex Ventures, Idealab and SoftBank.
SoftBank's $1 billion Vision Fund has invested $110 million into Energy Vault, a Swiss startup that has come up with an innovative way to store renewable energy to meet the ebb and flow of demand.
It's SoftBank's first investment into an energy-storage company and marks growing investor interest in the space as countries shift away from fossil fuels.
One of the thornier issues in the switch to renewable energy is that energy provided by the weather is, naturally, dependent on the weather.
A sunnier or gloomier day will dictate whether energy production goes up or down, potentially overloading the grid. That can lead to power cuts. And most power grids were built with fossil fuel rather than renewable sources in mind. The issue then is around capturing and storing any excess energy for days and months when consumer demand is higher.
Some firms are already working on short-term energy storage â it's why Tesla built a giant lithium-ion battery next to a wind farm in Australia. But, according to Robert Piconi, the CEO and cofounder of Energy Vault, batteries work only to smooth out short-term spikes in energy demand. You need other technologies to store renewable energy for months at a time, something that is likely to become more common.
"You want to store that in an efficient way, in a way that doesn't degrade," he told Business Insider. "Like in a chemical battery â if you're going to store it, that solution is going to degrade over time."
This stack of concrete bricks is Energy Vault's alternative to the giant battery:
Energy Vault stores surplus electricity through, essentially, a battery made of bricks. This is a rendered image. Energy Vault
The stack is made up of 35-metric-ton bricks, topped by an autonomous six-arm crane. As a solar or wind farm produces surplus energy, the crane's software directs it to pick up and stack the bricks to form a tower. Energy is stored in the elevation gain. As and when energy is needed, the crane's software returns to the bricks from the ground and turns the resulting kinetic energy into electricity.
The tower can be as big as needed, and Energy Vault says each plant has a capacity of between 10 and 35 megawatt-hours and power output of between 2 and 5 megawatts.
Here's a simulation of the tower in action:
The concept, according to Piconi, is similar to mainstream pumped hydro-storage solutions, which use a reservoir and dam system to store energy. With pumped hydro, however, "you have a dependency on that topography and if you build it, it hurts the environment."
"It hurts the wildlife and the local ecosystem," Piconi said. "So while that's the largest type of energy storage today, all the best locations have been built. And it's not mobile, you can't go build in other locations."
Ravi Manghani, the head of energy storage at the consultancy Wood Mackenzie, said Energy Vault's tower "has all the makings of good long-duration storage."
He said: "It's cheap, it's readily off-the-shelf for the most part, and it's going to last forever if you take care of it. It's not a lot of manufacturing investment to build those blocks, and then it can last decades, unlike some current technologies. Most of the battery storage would last about 10 or 20 years, but here we're talking about lasting double that."
Energy Vault was founded in 2017 and launched in 2018, and has announced Tata Power, one of India's biggest energy providers, as a customer. It's building a 35 megawatt-hour tower in Milan for completion this year. It also has a partnership with the Mexican materials firm CEMEX.
According to Piconi, the money from SoftBank is part of the Japanese investor's efforts to back big global ideas, such as tackling climate change. "They're trying to invest in things that solve big world problems, climate change being, I think, one of the highest priority problems we have," he said. "It's no surprise SoftBank would be trying to find a solution in energy storage."
Manghani said SoftBank's backing signaled growing investor interest in energy storage. "It does speak volumes about which the direction of storage investment is going. We'll see many more investments in the coming months and years as this area gets more mature."
Amazon is making a big push to help third-party sellers donate their unsold products instead of trashing them.
The online retail giant is launching a new program called Fulfillment by Amazon Donations, where eligible excess and returned products from sellers will be donated to nonprofits and charities in the United States and United Kingdom.
The donation program will kick off in September, and the donation option will automatically apply to inventory that sellers choose to dispose of manually, says an email that an Amazon seller appears to have recently received. CNBC earlier reported the program's existence.
The launch comes after investigations from a French TV station and UK-based news outlet The Daily Mail found that Amazon destroys unsold items â even those that are worth hundreds of dollars. The French TV station, called M6, filmed a "destruction zone" where items are junked as part of a documentary.
In the US Amazon will be working with Good360, which partners with retailers and consumer goods companies to distribute products to nonprofit organizations. Amazon's UK partners for the program include charities such as Newlife, Salvation Army, and Barnado's.
The program is the latest effort by the Seattle-based e-commerce behemoth to make its delivery methods and processes less wasteful. Earlier this year, the company set a goal to reach 50% of all Amazon shipments with net zero carbon by the year 2030, an initiative Amazon is calling "Shipment Zero." It also works with manufacturer to help them design more sustainable packaging to cut down on waste throughout the supply chain.
Over 500 Googlers are urging their company not to bid on a cloud-computing contract with the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in what's the latest in a series of employee protests at the Silicon Valley tech giant.
The CBP contractâ which seeks to "acquire services from a Cloud Services Provider" â has stirred controversy amongst Google's rank-and-file due to the agency's recent handling of migrants at the US southern border, the petition released on Wednesday said.
"The winning cloud provider will be streamlining CBP's infrastructure and facilitating its human rights abuses," the petition read, in part. "We demand that Google publicly commit not to support CBP, ICE, or ORR with any infrastructure, funding, or engineering resources, directly or indirectly, until they stop engaging in human rights abuses."
The contract was first posted on July 10th and bids were due on August 1st.
A Google spokesperson declined to confirm with Business Insider whether or not the company bid on the cloud services contract.
From the list of "interested vendors" on the Federal Business Opportunities website, it is not immediately clear if Google is amongst the 21 vendors who applied. From the statement of work, it is also not immediately clear how much the contract could potentially be worth, though Google employees on Wednesday described it as "massive."
Read more: Google reportedly has a massive culture problem that's destroying it from the inside
In their petition, employees pointed to Google's AI Principles as reason for not working with the CBP, an agency they say is in "grave violation of international human rights law." Those AI principals were established last June when Google decided not to renew its contract with the Pentagon â known as Project Maven â after thousands of employees wrote a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai and demanded that the company "not be in the business of war."
Within the statement of work, the Department of Homeland Security notes that the CBP already uses Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Google Cloud Platform for its "Enterprise Infrastructure." The contract, it appears, aims at consolidating the number of cloud providers for the CBP.
"The Government is pursuing a cloud strategy to increase access to cloud innovation and reduce the disadvantages associated with multiple cloud service providers/resellers," the statement of work reads.
Google has come under hot water as of late from lawmakers in Washington, and in particular, tech billionaire Peter Thiel, for not supporting projects with the US military â like its decision to not renew its AI contract with the Pentagon. Critics say while the Silicon Valley giant shuns the US military, it's simultaneously engaging in research efforts in China, which by law in that country require sharing information with the Chinese military.
Thiel said Google's actions are "seemingly treasonous," and called on the FBI and CIA to investigate. Recently, in early August, President Donald Trump said that Google was being watched "very closely."
Although it remains unclear whether Google has actually bid on the CBP contract, the petition from employees shows just how difficult it will be for the tech giant to pursue major government deals as it tries to ramp up its cloud computing division. Government contracts are an important revenue stream for cloud leaders, Amazon and Microsoft, and with employee backlash at even the prospect of a deal, it seems like attempts by Google to enter that arena could be thwarted internally.
International money transfer startup TransferWise’s debit card is now available in Australia and New Zealand, with a Singapore launch expected by the end of this year as the company expands its presence in the Asia-Pacific region. TransferWise’s debit card, which features low, transparent fees and exchange rates, first launched in the United Kingdom and Europe last year before arriving in the United States in June. Since its launch, the company claims the debit card has been used for 15 million transactions.
Australian and New Zealand customers will have access to the TransferWise Platinum debit Mastercard (a business debit card is also available). Cards are linked to TransferWise accounts, which give holders bank account numbers and details in multiple countries, making it easier and cheaper to send and receive multiple currencies. The company says that over the past year, customers have deposited more than $10 billion in their accounts.
TransferWise’s debit cards allow users to spend in more than 40 currencies at real exchange rates. In an email, co-founder and CEO Kristo Käärmann told TechCrunch that TransferWise decided to launch its debit card in Australia and New Zealand because its business there has already been growing quickly. “In addition to responding to customer demand, launching the card in Australia and New Zealand was also driven by the fact that Aussies and Kiwis are being overcharged by banks for using their own money abroad. It is expensive to use debit, travel and credit cards for spending or withdrawals,” he said.
Käärmann added that “independent research conducted by Capital Economics showed that Australians lost $2.14 billion last year alone just for using their bank-issued card abroad. This is because banks and other providers charge transaction fees every time someone uses their card abroad, plus an inflated exchange rate. Similarly, in New Zealand, Kiwis lost $1 billion simply for using their card abroad.”
One of TransferWise’s competitive advantages is that unlike most legacy banking and money transfer services, its accounts and cards were designed from the start to be used internationally. “While there are existing multi-currency cards that exist in Australia and New Zealand, they are prohibitively expensive to use. For example in Australia, the TransferWise Platinum debit Mastercard is on average 11 times cheaper than most travel, debit, prepaid and credit cards,” Käärmann said.
TransferWise cards don’t have transaction fees or exchange rate markups and cardholders are allowed to withdraw up to AUD $350 every 30 days for free at any ATM in the world.
The company is currently talking to regulators in several Asian countries, a process that can take up to two years, Käärmann said. It was recently granted a remittance license in Malaysia, and plans to make its remittance service available there by the end of this year.
Flatfair, a London-based fintech that lets landlords offer “deposit-free” renting to tenants, has raised $11 million in funding.
The Series A round is led by Index Ventures, with participation from Revolt Ventures, Adevinta, Greg Marsh (founder of Onefinestay), Jeremy Helbsy (former Savills CEO) and Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise co-founder).
With the new capital, Flatfair says it plans to hire a “significant” number of product engineers, data scientists and business development specialists.
The startup will also invest in building out new features as it looks to expand its platform with “a focus on making renting fairer and more transparent for landlords and tenants.”
“With the average deposit of £1,110 across England and Wales being just shy of the national living wage, tenants struggle to pay expensive deposits when moving into their new home, often paying double deposits in between tenancies,” Flatfair co-founder and CEO Franz Doerr tells me when asked to frame the problem the startup has set out to solve.
“This creates cash flow issues for tenants, in particular for those with families. Some tenants end up financing the deposit through friends and family or even accrue expensive credit card debt. The latter can have a negative impact on the tenant’s credit rating, further restricting important access to credit for things that really matter in a tenant’s life.”
To remedy this, Flatfair’s “insurance-backed” payment technology provides tenants with the option to pay a per-tenancy membership fee instead of a full deposit. They do this by authorising their bank account via debit card with Flatfair, and when it is time to move out, any end-of-tenancy charges are handled via the Flatfair portal, including dispute resolution.
So, for example, rather than having to find a rental deposit equivalent to a month’s rent, which in theory you would get back once you move out sans any end-of-tenancy charges, with Flatfair you pay about a quarter of that as a non-refundable fee.
Of course, there are pros and cons to both, but for tenants that are cashflow restricted, the startup’s model at least offers an alternative financing option.
In addition, tenants registered with Flatfair are given a “trust score” that can go up over time, helping them move tenancy more easily in the future. The company is also trialing the use of Open Banking to help with credit checks by analysing transaction history to verify that you have paid rent regularly and on time in the past.
Landlords are said to like the model. Current Flatfair clients include major property owners and agents, such as Greystar, Places for People and CBRE. “Before Flatfair, deposits were the only form of tenancy security that landlords trusted,” claims Doerr.
In the event of a dispute over end-of-tenancy charges, both landlords and tenants are asked to upload evidence to the Flatfair platform and to try to settle the disagreement amicably. If they can’t, the case is referred by Flatfair to an independent adjudicator via mydeposits, a U.K. government-backed deposit scheme with which the company is partnering.
“In such a case, all the evidence is submitted to mydeposits and they come back with a decision within 24 hours,” explains Doerr. “[If] the adjudicator says that the tenant owes money, we invoice the tenant who then has five days to pay. If the tenant doesn’t pay, we charge their bank account… What’s key here is having the evidence. People are generally happy to pay if the costs are fair and where clear evidence exists, there’s less to argue about.”
More broadly, Doerr says there’s significant scope for digitisation across the buy-to-let sector and that the big vision for Flatfair is to create an “operating system” for rentals.
“The fundamental idea is to streamline processes around the tenancy to create revenue and savings opportunities for landlords and agents, whilst promoting a better customer experience, affordability and fairness for tenants,” he says.
“We’re working on a host of exciting new features that we’ll be able to talk about in the coming months, but we see opportunities to automate more functions within the life cycle of a tenancy and think there are a number of big efficiency savings to be made by unifying old systems, dumping old paper systems and streamlining cumbersome admin. Offering a scoring system for tenants is a great way of encouraging better behaviour and, given housing represents most people’s biggest expense, it’s only right renters should be able to build up their credit score and benefit from paying on time.”
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