While not a startup visa, the EB-5 investor green card offers many entrepreneurs a path to a green card by investing money and creating jobs in the U.S. Under the EB-5 program, an entrepreneur’s family is also eligible for green cards.

Imminent regulatory changes to the EB-5 program are expected to make obtaining an EB-5 green card a whole lot more expensive. The minimum investment is anticipated to more than double to $1.35 million from the current $500,000. And with individuals from India expected to face a backlog for EB-5 green cards shortly, the opportunity to obtain an EB-5 green card at a relatively low cost and in a timely manner is closing.

Ringing the Nasdaq market bell was the thrill of a lifetime — both when I did it as a founder and also vicariously as a VC via my incredible founders who have taken their companies public. There’s nothing like seeing the baby you nurtured mature into a multibillion-dollar public entity.

But times have changed. The dramatic influx of late-stage venture capital is enabling companies to slow walk their public offerings. In addition, the accumulation of mountains of cash by strategic buyers and the rise of private equity buy-out firms are making other forms of exits viable options.

Case in point: The number of publicly listed companies has dropped 52%, but entrepreneurship momentum hasn’t slowed; it has actually accelerated. Many of the companies that are finally going public this year are doing so several years after they could have — and would have — in years past. When Uber went public this year, its valuation was so large that it would have registered as 280 on this year’s Fortune 500 list. TransferWise prolonged any move to the public markets through a secondary sale that allowed them to stay private while more than doubling their valuation.

IPOs aren’t for everyone or every company — or indeed for most companies. According to PitchBook, only 3% of venture-backed companies in the last decade eventually went public. Most startups that don’t go public never had the option to do so. However, some founders who could IPO are actively choosing to delay IPOs due to the many challenges of managing a public company.

For starters, employee moods shift with the stock price. I once had an employee mad at me for not telling him to sell when I knew we were going to have a weak quarter. That would have been illegal! Also, IPOs come with a burden of public scrutiny; the administrative hassles take up precious time, and 90-day reporting cycles often conflict with long-term strategic planning. In addition, many public investors are only interested in short-term moves; plus, there’s the related risk of activist investors upending the company’s long-term strategy in pursuit of their own short-term goals.

Despite the challenges, going public is still important for many high-growth companies. Here’s why:

IPOs make it easier to compete for talent. Public stock offers clearly valued, tangible cash value to candidates and employees who are either weighing competitive offers or who need to be retained. While private companies can provide one-off private liquidity events via secondary sales, public companies have a far greater ability to engage and retain valued team members though the continuous, orderly disbursement of stock-based compensation.IPOs can facilitate a company’s ability to make acquisitions, as well as facilitate strategic partnerships. After going public, my company used its public equity to make 16 acquisitions, which in part helped to fuel our growth from a few hundred million to a multibillion-dollar valuation. Even though private companies can make acquisitions with stock, it’s far easier to do a deal with tradable public currency. It’s also easier to enter into important strategic partnerships because prospective partners have easily accessible information about the company’s business and financial position.IPOs are a big milestone and mark of achievement for the entire team. IPOs boost employee morale and job satisfaction. Employees who help shepherd their company from its early stages through IPO feel accomplishment and camaraderie, and achieving this milestone contributes measurably to corporate culture. They are not bad for employees’ and founders’ pocketbooks, either!Operating under the watchful eye of Wall Street is cumbersome but makes a company resilient. As complicated as it is to manage a public company, public scrutiny often makes companies more disciplined on execution, which helps them build more predictable businesses. This discipline and transparency can drive long-term success — which in turn accrues to the benefit of its customers, partners, stockholders and employees.The tech IPO window is open right now. Stock markets track the boom and bust cycles of the economy. The so-called “IPO window” for tech stocks can close as surely as it’s open right now. Many companies are planning to “get out” while this window is open. IPO windows can sometimes close for several years, so floating your stock when the window is open is an important consideration. In addition, due to the decline in number of publicly listed companies over the last decade, there is a pent-up demand for fast-growing tech IPOs, as demonstrated by the positive reception that Beyond Meat, CrowdStrike and Zoom received from public investors.

For those founders with their eye on the IPO ball, here’s my advice:

Raise plenty of money. Right now, VC dollars are plentiful, and the cost of capital is cheap. However, if you have access to plentiful capital, so do your worthy competitors; you don’t want be disadvantaged relative to them. Use this capital wisely and keep some in reserve just in case the markets turn. My company had to abort its IPO just days before we embarked on our IPO “road show” when the markets turned. We had to survive on the cash we had in the bank for a full two years before we successfully went public.Consider vertical integration. A lot of the businesses going public today or on track to do so in the next few years have adopted business models that encompass every element of the user experience and allow companies to capture a large share of the value stack. We’re especially seeing this in capital-intensive verticals like Katerra in construction and Opendoor in housing (each valued at about $4 billion). We Company (WeWork), expected to IPO this year at a rumored $47 billion valuation, has vertically integrated every element of physical workspaces. Extraordinarily capital intensive, this type of vertical integration creates tremendous value and deep competitive moats. Importantly, these businesses only can be built in environments such as now, where plenty of capital is available with reasonable dilution.Consider broadening your product capabilities. With plenty of cash on hand and your company sitting at a nice revenue multiple, it may be wise to consider broadening your offering while you are still private; both via investment in internal development resources and by acquiring companies with complementary products but less significant market traction. This is particularly relevant for enterprise companies where the cost of customer acquisition is high. With a broader product offering, you can sell more to existing customers, amortizing your acquisition costs and hopefully improving retention with a more complete product offering.Scale as quickly as possible. Because capital is available so cheaply, the IPO-bound companies that win have become the companies that grow quickly, leveraging capital to capture market share faster than their competitors. Uber and WeWork are examples of companies that have used access to capital to scale so quickly that they’ve been able to capture market share from their numerous less-endowed competitors.Review the capabilities of your team and your board for public market scrutiny. Unlike some people who believe that the company needs to bring in an “IPO team” to go public, my experience is that most founders and senior managers are perfectly capable of growing into the public market executive role. They just need to be aware of the rules and regulations, and they need to be advised to use proper judgement. Even so, you may find that you need to “beef up” your team in a few areas such as finance and bring in seasoned executives in other areas such as investor relations. The right board structure for a public company is equally important. Adding board talent with public company experience — particularly in audit oversight and governance areas — is highly recommended.

Every company charts its own path to success, so what’s best for one company isn’t necessarily what’s best for another. I personally wouldn’t trade my experience of going public for the world, and I believe that the talented founders taking their companies public this year feel the same way. What’s great about today’s market environment is that going public — or not — is a choice that lies squarely where it should: in the hands of founders.

Could Roblox create a new entertainment and communication category, something it calls “human co-experience”?

When it was a small startup, few observers would have believed in that future. But after 15 years — as told in the origin story of our Roblox EC-1 — the company has accumulated 90 million users and a new $150 million venture funding war chest. It has captured the imagination of America’s youth, and become a startup darling in the entertainment space.

But what, exactly, is human co-experience? Well, it can’t be described precisely — because it’s still an emerging category. “It’s almost like that fable where the nine blind men are touching and describing an elephant.

Everyone has a slightly different view,” says co-founder and CEO Dave Baszucki. In Roblox’s view, co-experience means immersive environments where users play, explore, talk, hang out, and create an identity that’s as thoroughly fleshed out (if not as fleshy) as their offline, real life.

But the next decade at Roblox will also be its most challenging time yet, as it seeks to expand from 90 million users to, potentially, a billion or more. To do so, it needs to pull off two coups.

First, it needs to expand the age range of its players beyond its current tween and teen audience. Second, it must win the international market. Accomplishing both of these will be a puzzle with many moving parts.

What Roblox is today

One thing Roblox has done very well is appeal to kids within a certain age range. The company says that a majority of all 9-to-12-year-old children in the United States are on its platform.

Within that youthful segment, Roblox has arguably already created the human co-experience category. Many games are more cooperative than competitive, or have goals that are unclear or don’t seem to matter much. One of Roblox’s most popular games, for instance, is MeepCity, where players can run around and chat in virtual environments like a high school without necessarily interacting with the game mechanics at all.

What else separates these environments from what you can see today on, say, the App Store or Steam? A few characteristics seem common.

For one, the environments look rough. One Robloxian put the company’s relaxed attitude toward looks as “not over-indexing on visual fidelity.”

Roblox games also ignore the design principles now espoused by nearly every game company. Tutorials are infrequent, user interfaces are unpolished, and one gets the sense that KPIs like retention and engagement are not being carefully measured.

That’s similar to how games on platforms like Facebook and the App Store started out, so it seems reasonable to say Roblox is just in a similarly early stage. It is — but it’s also competing directly with mobile games that are more rigorously designed. Over half of its players are on smartphones, where they could have chosen a free game that looks more polished, like Fortnite or Clash of Clans.

The more accurate explanation of why Roblox draws big player numbers is that there’s a gap in the kids entertainment market. So far, only Roblox fills that gap, despite its various shortcomings.

“The amount of unstructured, undirected play has been declining for decades. [Kids] have much more homework, and structured activities like theater after school.

One of the big unmet needs we solve is to give kids a place to have imagination,” explains Craig Donato, Roblox’s chief business officer. “If you play the experiences on our platform, you’re not playing to win. You go into these worlds with people you know and share an experience.”

Games like The Sims tried to do the same, but eventually faded in the children’s demo. Roblox’s trick has been continued growth: it provides kids with an endless array of games that unlock their imagination. But just like we don’t expect adults to have fun with Barbie dolls, it’s unlikely most adults would enjoy Roblox games.

Of course, it would be easy to point at Roblox and laugh off its ambitions to win over people of all ages. That laughter would also be short-sighted.

As David Sze, the Greylock Partners investor who led Roblox’s most recent round, pointed out: “When we invested in Facebook there was a huge amount of pushback that nobody would use it outside college.” Companies that have won over one demographic have a good chance of winning others.

Roblox has also proven its ability to evolve. At one time, the platform’s players were 90 percent male. Now, that’s down to about 60 percent. Roblox now has far more girls playing than the typical game platform.

Evolving to new demographics

Birthday cakes, gift cards, free lunches, snacks, movie tickets, and other perks are generously bestowed on employees to celebrate life’s happy moments. This is an improvement from the industrial approach to management, but can we go deeper for our work-family members?

Life’s darker moments hold the greatest opportunity to exemplify a genuine and caring 21st-century workplace culture. One which fosters empathy and camaraderie. Employee turnover is highest when employees take leave, claim FMLA, or use PTO. According to Global Studies, 79% of employees report their reason for quitting was simply due to feeling unnoticed (lack of appreciation).

Appreciation for your employees is best demonstrated as an act of kindness in moments that really matter, like the loss of a family member. Acknowledging that someone great is gone, instead of ignoring the uncomfortable aspects of grief, is a valuable way to embed empathy into your workplace culture.

Recently, while working with a mid-sized (500+ employees) tech company, I asked what they were doing to support employees during the negative life moments. The HR Director replied, “um, nothing really”.

Once realizing how crappy that sounded, another executive countered her by saying he sent an employee a t-shirt and card after a miscarriage. I later learned that the employee he was referring to had been with the company for over 5 years, so it’s safe to assume that she had a couple of company swag t-shirts in her collection prior to getting one as a get well gift.

Even in the largest and most notable companies, where a variety of employee amenities and benefits are offered, the concept and practice of empathy is often neglected. Perhaps you haven’t come across such extreme examples of indifference in your workplace, but you may have participated in signing a generic condolences card or chipping in for some flowers.

Ritik Dholakia worked as a startup product manager before he co-founded Studio Rodrigo, a branding and product design agency based in NYC. Unlike traditional branding firms, Studio Rodrigo is proud of its product design chops, especially when it comes to helping early-stage startups build version one of their product. It’s not an easy balancing act since most companies eventually want to bring their product design talent in-house, but it turns out, Studio Rodrigo can help with that too. Learn more about the studio in our Q&A with founder Ritik Dholakia.

Studio Rodrigo’s unique approach:

“Basically, we’re a full-stack product design team. We have people who can do brand identity from a pure graphic design and visual communications standpoint, and who can also connect the dots between design and technology, business, and customer needs. We don’t have a traditional agency model with a project and account management overhead. You work directly with our designers.”

On Studio Rodrigo’s ideal client:

“We like working with clients that are solving big, meaty, challenging problems. We’ve got a smart team that likes to wrap their heads around the kinds of technologies that are pushing industries forward. For us, that’s currently technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup brand designers and agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already. 

Interview with Studio Rodrigo Co-founder Ritik Dholakia

Yvonne Leow: First things first, how did you get into brand design and product development?

Ritik Dholakia: I’ve been in digital design and product development for about 20 years now. I actually started my career as a product manager at a startup. I worked for two venture-backed startups as the first product manager. I was part of the Series A team, managing product development, acquiring initial customers, and building market traction.

The first startup was an enterprise software platform for customers doing triple bottom line reporting. The second one was one of the earliest social networking platforms, pre-Facebook, and around the same time as Friendster, LinkedIn, and Spoke.

Eghosa Emoigui: I decided that it made sense to look at those emerging markets. I ended up picking Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, in part, because they felt very highly-correlated. You had...

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Sage is giving reviewers, chefs and other experts and publishers a central place to share all their content.

To do this, the startup has created a new product called Sage Plus for Experts, which isn’t open to the public yet, but is accepting signups from those aforementioned travel experts — the kinds of experts who can share content around things to do, food, drinks, experiences and shopping.

Founder and CEO Samir Arora (who previously led Mode Media/Glam Media) suggested that a Sage profile can serve as the center of a creator or publisher’s online presence. And eventually, it could become the foundation for them to build their own personal direct-to-consumer brand.

In the announcement, Arora said the product was designed to answer a simple question: “Why does the internet not offer a simple way to show recommendations by real experts or the authentic experiences and products by the brands we trust and love?”

Back in 2017, when he first told me about his vision for Sage, Arora said his goal was to create a reliable source for location data. In an interview earlier this month, he said the plan to focus on verified sources eventually led him to this new product.

“We started to say that the only way to have verified information is to go backwards, to verify the sources of information — the journalists,” he said.

To do that, Sage starting curating a list of trusted experts, and it started working with those experts, who Arora said were asking for something like this. He showed me how someone could come onto the Sage service and quickly connect their social media accounts and author pages —after that, the profile updates automatically.

So there’s no technical expertise required, and after the initial setup, no additional work — though if they want to, experts can also post reviews and lists made specifically for Sage. They can even publish their Sage profile as a separate mobile app, and start monetizing through things like bookings and merchandise sales.

In some cases, the profile will already exist, and the expert simply needs to claim it.

“We’ve been manually curating sources while training an AI to reliably go out into the world to find people who are professionally in this business,” Arora said.

He added that Sage’s list has already grown to 5 million experts, with 200,000 active profiles. The active experts include food critic Masuhiro Yamamoto (whom you may know from “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”).

Ultimately, all expert content goes back into the broader Sage platform, and it will allow the startup to recommend trustworthy publishers and provide travel recommendations on what to do and where to go.

BioConnect CEO Rob Douglas has built a thriving founder-financed business from Toronto using very sophisticated strategic maneuvering. I just loved discussing the strategic nuances of this business....

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Meet Dejbox, a French food delivery startup that tries to avoid busy cities in order to accommodate people who really need a new lunch option. The company is a food delivery startup that designs its own meals and works with other companies to cook them, sell them and deliver them.

“Corporate headquarters are more and more often far from city centers. But what about lunch options for those areas?,” co-founder and co-CEO Vincent Dupied told me.

Answering this question creates logistical challenges more than anything else. It’s hard to cover wide areas that are spread out all around busy cities, such as Paris, Lille and Lyon. And Dejbox has made some radical decisions that set them apart from well-known companies, such as Deliveroo, Uber Eats or even Frichti.

Each delivery person drives a truck with 100 to 150 meals. This way, they can deliver to multiple offices during one run. It means that customers can’t just order something and get it 30 minutes later.

They need to complete their order before 10:30am or 11am to get it for lunch time. And, of course, you also can order multiple days in advance in case you don’t want to think about lunch for the rest of the week.

When it comes to sales, Dejbox tries to spot the most promising companies to pitch them the service. After that, multiple employees usually order from Dejbox every day. It means that delivery persons carry multiple meals and leave them in the kitchen or at the reception desk.

“Our delivery persons are a bit like mail carriers, they have the same itinerary every day and their own clients,” Dupied said.

That’s why Dejbox wants to empower its delivery staff as much as possible. They’re all full-time employees and they get monthly reports telling them how much revenue they’ve generated for the company.

This combination of low customer acquisition cost, low unit economics and high lifetime value has been working well. Partech first spotted them at the end of 2015 and invested a tiny $560,000 seed round (€500,000). Dejbox was only delivering 80 meals per day in the Lille area back then.

The startup quickly expanded to Paris and Lyon with the same focus on corporate headquarters in boring areas. In March 2017, Dejbox raised a $2.3 million Series A round (€2 million) from Partech and Leap Ventures. The company launched in Bordeaux a few months later.

And the company is quite transparent when it comes to metrics. During the first ~18 months, the startup generated $1.4 million in revenue, $4.5 million in 2017 and $11.3 million in 2018 (€1.2 million, €4 million and €10 million, respectively).

This year, the company plans to generate $22.5 million in revenue (€20 million) and open in two new cities — Nantes and Grenoble. Dejbox now delivers to 10,000 people every day.

According to IBIS World Research, US-based web design services industry is expected to grow 6.6% annually to $38.3 billion by the end of 2019. Israel-based Wix (Nasdaq:WIX) recently announced its...

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City Pantry, the office catering marketplace that lets you order in food for staff, company events and meetings, has been acquired by takeout marketplace and delivery giant Just Eat.

The price is described as an initial cash offering of £16 million, with a possible further payout due if City Pantry achieves agreed operational and financial targets over the next three years.

The premise of the acquisition is to enable consumer-focused Just Eat to further expand into the U.K. corporate catering market by leveraging City Pantry’s brand, technology and sector knowledge. City Pantry claims more than 1,000 monthly corporate customers.

Founded by Stuart Sunderland in 2013, City Pantry set out to improve the catering options available to companies in London. Its marketplace connects local caterers to businesses that need quality food delivered to their offices or to cover events, meetings and regular team meals.

When the startup first launched, Sunderland viewed its main competitors as traditional corporate caterers, sandwich retailers, pizza delivery places and, to a lesser extent, the newer breed of restaurant delivery companies such as Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber’s UberEATs. However, as mindshare of these services has grown, it is likely that consumer and corporate catering has increasingly encroached on one another.

In this context, Just Eat’s acquisition of City Pantry makes a lot of sense for what is a relatively low price to gain a stronger foothold in the corporate market. Given that publicly listed Just Eat is coming under increasing pressure from Deliveroo and UberEATs, it is also smart to demonstrate continuing momentum to the public markets. Small incremental acquisitions like this are a tried and tested way of doing so.

City Pantry is thought to have last raised funding in early 2018: a £4 million round led by Octopus Investments, with participation from Newable Private Investing. The startup’s other backers included Angel CoFund, The London Co Investment fund (both of which are part-funded by U.K. tax-payer money) and various angels. City Pantry was also a graduate of retail startup accelerator TrueStart.

In a statement issued to TechCrunch, Tim Mills, investment director of the Angel CoFund, comments:

This deal is credit to founder Stuart Sunderland and his team for recognising a need for quality of choice in the corporate catering market and building a marketplace that has been adopted by restaurants and corporates alike. The team has successfully grown the business in the U.K. and demonstrated the commercial opportunity in the B2B market, which is what has made it such an attractive investment for Just Eat. The acquisition is a great opportunity for the company to continue to scale beyond the U.K., with Just Eat opening up new markets for the business. City Pantry has achieved a lot in the past four years and delivered a good return for investors, I look forward to seeing the team reach new heights with Just Eat.

Adds Peter Duffy, interim CEO of Just Eat, in a statement:

Working with City Pantry to accelerate its mission to improve and modernise the workplace dining experience is a great opportunity for Just Eat. It’s the right time for us to enter the corporate market and expand our offering.
City Pantry has a well-established business, fantastic expertise and an entrepreneurial spirit that matches our own. We look forward to bringing the company into the Just Eat family and working with them to grow in the UK and internationally in this exciting and dynamic market.

Sramana Mitra: You started your next company in 2012? Loris Degioanni: 2013. I left Riverbed in 2012. My rotation period with Riverbed was for two years. Despite being very happy at Riverbed and...

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Kencko, a company that wants to help people eat more fruit and vegetables in their daily life, is entering feast mode after it announced a $3.4 million seed round for growth and product development.

We profiled the company last year, but — for those who missed it — Kencko develops plant-based products that help people eat healthily without having to suffer the pain of horrible-tasting food or other extreme eating. That’s to say that its fruit drinks, the company’s first product, include the pulp and vitamins absent in pressed juice but come in a convenient sachet that has been flash-frozen and slow-dried to retain all the goodness. The company says that each packet, which is 20g and mixes with water, contains two of the five-a-day recommendation for fruit and vegetable servings.

Right now, Kencko — which means health in Japanese — is selling the fruit drink with six flavor options. Founder and CEO Tomás Froes said the plan is to add as many as half a dozen new options before this year is out. Also coming are two new products that, like the drinks, are made from 100% organic fruits and vegetables to, again, make it easy and tasty to eat healthily.

Beyond products, Kencko is also using the new capital to develop its direct-to-consumer strategy. A big focus of that is its mobile app, which is currently in beta with early customers but will get a full launch this year, according to Froes.

Kencko products are sold in units but also as a subscription, and that bundle will include a personal nutritionist — from Kencko’s in-house team — who will use data collected in the app to help customers personalize their diet and approach to health. Further down the line, that may include face-to-face appointments in parts of the U.S. and remote-based sessions, added Froes — who runs the 25-person company with co-founder and CBO Ricardo Vice Santos.

Kencko is focused on the U.S. and Canada but is available worldwide. Customers can buy the fruit drink through a $16 three-day-trial pack, or more committed packages of 20 and 60 sachets, which cost $60 and $150, respectively.

Froes became a vegan after being diagnosed with acute gastritis. He was inspired to start the company in 2017 after a 90% fruit and vegetable diet cleared the condition without medicine — a doctor had previously told him that he would need to be treated with a cocktail of pills for the rest of his life.

Now, with plant-based brands like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat booming and increased media coverage of the science and sustainability of food, Froes believes interest in healthy diet options has never been higher.

“There is demand for more transparency and knowledge on ingredients,” he explained in an interview. “The past few years have sparked a completely new revolution around food.”

The investment came from NextView Ventures, LocalGlobe, Kairos Ventures, Techstars, Max Ventures and other unnamed backers. Kencko took part in Techstar’s London accelerator last year.

During this week’s roundtable, we had one entrepreneur pitch, and a lengthy discussion around a very niche business that I found very promising as a viable small business. It’s an interesting case...

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We can’t wait to dig into the competitive, high-stakes world of enterprise software at TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 on September 5 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. We’re channeling the excitement into creating extra ROI for you. How’s that work? Read on.

It starts with the $100 you’ll save when you buy your early-bird ticket. Here comes the extra part. For every ticket you buy to TC Sessions: Enterprise, we’ll register you for a free Expo-only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019. Who doesn’t like free?

We expect more than 1,000 attendees — including some of the top minds, makers and investors in enterprise software — for a day-long intensive event focused on the promises and challenges of this massive $500 billion market. You can expect onstage interviews, exhibiting startups, breakout sessions, receptions and more. TechCrunch editors Frederic Lardinois, Ron Miller and Connie Loizos will interview founders from both established and emerging companies about crucial topics, like intelligent marketing automation, AI and the inevitability of the cloud.

Case in point. You can’t talk about enterprise software or its shift to the cloud without talking about the Kubernetes container management system. That’s why we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to sit down with Aparna Sinha, Google’s director of product management for Kubernetes; Tim Hockin, who currently works on Kubernetes and the Google Container Engine; Kubernetes co-founder Craig McLuckie; and Microsoft’s Brendan Burns — the lead engineer for Kubernetes during his time at Google.

These four heavy hitters will discuss the history of Kubernetes, why Google went open source with it and the five-year-old project’s rapid growth. It promises to be a fascinating look at the past, present and future of containers in the enterprise.

That’s just one presentation in a jam-packed day dedicated to all things enterprise. Check out the speakers we have on tap so far. And by all means, if there’s someone you want to hear on the stage, send us your speaker submissions.

TC Sessions Enterprise 2019 takes place September 5. Early-bird tickets cost $249, and student tickets sell for $75. Buy 4+ tickets to get the group rate and save another 20%. And remember, you’ll receive a free Expo-only pass to Disrupt SF 2019 with every TC Sessions: Enterprise ticket.

Get your early-bird tickets now, and we’ll see you in September!

Interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Enterprise? Fill out this form and a member of our sales team will contact you.

Refraction, a new autonomous delivery robot company that came out of stealth Wednesday at TC Sessions: Mobility, sees opportunity in areas most AV startups are avoiding: regions with the worst weather.

The company, founded by University of Michigan professors Matthew Johnson-Roberson and Ram Vasudevan, calls its REV-1 delivery robot the “Goldilocks of autonomous vehicles.”

The pair have a long history with autonomous vehicles. Johnson-Roberson got his start by participating in the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 and stayed in academia researching and then teaching robotics. Vasudevan’s career had a stint at Ford working on control algorithms for autonomous operations on snow and ice. Both work together at University of Michigan’s Robotics Program.

The REV-1 is lightweight and low cost — there are no expensive lidar sensors on the vehicle — it operates in a bike lane and is designed to travel in rain or snow, Johnson-Roberson, co-founder and CEO of Refraction told TechCrunch.

The robot, which debuted onstage at the California Theater in San Jose during the event, is about the size of an electric bicycle. The REV-1 weighs about 100 pounds and stands about 5 feet tall and is 4.5 feet long. Inside the robot is 16 cubic feet of space, enough room to fit four or five grocery bags.

It’s not particularly fast — top speed is 15 miles per hour. But because it’s designed for a bike lane, it doesn’t need to be. That slower speed and lightweight design allows the vehicle to have a short stopping distance of about five feet.

Refraction has backing from eLab Ventures and Trucks Venture Capital.

Consumers have an appetite and an expectation for on-demand goods that are delivered quickly. But companies are struggling to find consistent, reliable and economical ways to address that need, said Bob Stefanski, managing director of eLab Ventures.

Stefanksi believes Refraction’s sturdy, smaller-sized delivery robots will allow for faster technology development and will be able to cover a larger service area than competitors operating on the sidewalk.

“Their vehicles are also lightweight enough to deploy more safely than a self-driving car or large robot,” Stefanski noted. “The market is huge, especially in densely populated areas.”

The REV-1 uses a system of 12 cameras as its primary sensor system, along with radar and ultrasound sensors for additional safety.

“It doesn’t make sense economically speaking to use a $10,000 lidar to deliver $10 of food,” Johnson-Roberson said. By skipping the more expensive lidar sensor, they’re able to keep the total cost of the vehicle to $5,000.

The company’s first test application is with local restaurant partners. The company hopes to lock in bigger national partnerships in the next six months. But don’t expect those to be in the southwest or California, where so many other autonomous vehicle companies are testing.

“Other companies are not trying to run in the winter here,” Johnson-Roberson said. “It’s a different problem than the one that others are trying to solve, so we hope that gives us some space to breathe and some chance to carve out some opportunity.”

Jeff Ubersax knows yeast.

The chief executive officer of Demetrix studied yeast genetics and biochemistry in school and was an early employee at Amyris Biotechnologies, a technology company that was using fermentation to make biofuels back in the early days of the first clean technology boom back in 2008. 

Now, the same technology that Ubersax and Jay Keasling, the celebrated professor from the University of California at Berkeley who co-founded Amyris and Demetrix, used to make biofuels is being applied to the production of cannabis.

The company launched with an $11 million seed round led by Horizons Ventures, a Hong Kong-based investment fund backed by the multi-billionaire real estate mogul Li Ka-shing, to begin commercializing the technology that Keasling had been researching in his lab.

The goal was to refine a process that would enable yeasts to make a range of cannabinoids that are found in the marijuana plant which could be used to develop new pharmaceuticals, additives and supplements for use in clinical and consumer applications. The technology works much the same way as brewing beer. Except instead of fermenting to produce alcohol, the fermentation process produces cannabinoids from genetically modified yeast cells.

While the technology holds promise, it’s still got a long way to go before it becomes competitive with extracts from the marijuana plant, but given new capital infusions the tide is turning.

Demetrix, for instance, has raised another $50 million from Horizons Ventures and Tuatara Capital, an investment firm focused on the legal cannabis industry, to significantly expand its production while simultaneously pursuing initial tests on the efficacy of rare strains of cannabinoids as treatments for certain illnesses.

“Natural cannabinoids have been used for a really long time,” says Ubersax. And last June the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first pharmaceutical derived from cannabis, Epidiolex, as a treatment for patients with epilepsy.