Linear Labs, a startup developing an electric motor for cars, scooters, robots, wind turbines and even HVAC systems, has raised $4.5 million in a seed round led by Science Inc. and Kindred Ventures. 

Investors Chris and Crystal Sacca, Ryan Graves of Saltwater Ventures, Dynamic Signal CEO Russ Fradin, Masergy executive chairman and former-CEO Chris MacFarland, as well as Ustream co-founder Gyula Feher also participated in the round. 

The four-year-old company was founded by Brad and Fred Hunstable, who say they have invented a lighter, more flexible electric motor. The pair came up with the motor they’ve dubbed the Hunstable Electric Turbine (HET) while working to design a device that could pump clean water and provide power for small communities in underdeveloped regions of the world. 

Linear Labs currently has 50 filed patents, 21 of which are issued, with 29 patents pending.

The founders come with a background in entrepreneurship and electrical engineering. Brad Hunstable is former CEO and founder of Ustream, the live-video-streaming service that sold to IBM in 2016 for $150 million. Fred Hunstable, who comes with a background in electrical engineering and nuclear power, led Ebasco and Walker Engineering’s efforts in designing, upgrading and completing electrical infrastructure, environmental and enterprise projects as well as safety and commercial-grade evaluation programs.

The HET uses multiple rotors that can adapt to varying conditions, according to the company. It also produces twice as much torque density and three times the power density than permanent magnet motors. Linear Labs says its motor produces two times the output per given motor size, and minimum 10 percent more range. 

The HET design makes it ideally suited for mobility applications such as electric vehicles because it produces high levels of torque without the need for a gearbox. This helps cut production cuts, the company contends. 

“The holy grail in electric motors has always been high torque and no gearbox, and the HET achieves both in a smaller, lighter and more efficient package that is more powerful than traditional motors,” Linear Labs CTO Fred Hunstable said in a statement.

The upshot could be electric vehicles with better range and more powerful electric scooters.

The commercialization of the electric motor will result in substantial leaps in terms of energy savings, reliability enhancement, and low-cost manufacturing, according to Babak Fahimi, founding director of the Renewable Energy and Vehicular Technology (REVT) Laboratory at the University of Texas at Dallas. 

The company plans to use the seed funding to market its invention to customers. It’s also hiring talent and recently added new people to its leadership team, including John Curry as their president and Jon Hurry as vice president. Curry comes from KLA-Tencor and NanoPhotonics. Hurry has held positions at Tesla and Faraday Future.

Innoviz, the Israel-based startup developing solid-state lidar sensors and perception software for autonomous vehicles, has raised $132 million in a Series C funding round that includes major Chinese financial institutions.

The round, which makes Innoviz one of the better capitalized lidar startups, includes China Merchants Capital (SINO-BLR Industrial Investment Fund, L.P.), Shenzhen Capital Group and New Alliance Capital. Israeli institutional investors Harel Insurance Investments and Financial Services and Phoenix Insurance Company also participated. 

The Series C round will remain open for a second closing to be announced in the coming months, the company said.

Lidar measures distance using laser light to generate highly accurate 3D maps of the world around the car. It’s considered by most in the self-driving car industry a key piece of technology required to safely deploy robotaxis and other autonomous vehicles. Innoviz is developing solid-state lidar, which proponents of this technology say is more reliable over time because of the lack of moving parts.

Like so many startups with fresh capital, Innoviz plans to use the funds to scale up the company.

For Innoviz, this means increasing production of its lidar sensors and expanding its manufacturing capacity. Innoviz is focused on expanding in important automotive markets, including the U.S., Europe, Japan and China. Innoviz has been pushing into China over the past year through a partnership with the Chinese automotive supplier HiRain Technologies, a global supplier to some of China’s largest automakers.

That company has half of its business coming from China and has won nine of its supplier agreements with different automakers in the country through its HiRain partnership, according to people with knowledge of the company.

The company’s aim is to enable high-volume delivery of its automotive-grade lidar system called InnovizOne. This product can be produced and sold at a 90 percent lower cost than its first-generation system, according to Innoviz. 

Innoviz said it also plans to expand its research and development efforts by investing in the buildout of next-generation products and software that will feature more cost reductions and improved performance.

Innoviz’s strategy has been to partner with a number of OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers such as Magna, HARMAN, HiRain Technologies and Aptiv and to package perception software with its lidar sensors and offer it as a complete unit for companies developing autonomous vehicle technology.

Innoviz has locked in several key customers, notably BMW. The automaker picked Innoviz’s tech for series production of autonomous vehicles starting in 2021.

In March, Lyft announced a partnership with Magna to help get its self-driving tech into various automakers, as well as implement the ride-hailing service into future autonomous cars. Innoviz raised $65 million in Series B funding in 2017, from strategic partners and leading auto industry suppliers Delphi Automotive and Magna International, along with other investors.

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 437th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, March 28, 2019, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/4 p.m. CET/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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Tribe, which helps brands acquire content from so-called “micro-influencers,” has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding.

The startup was founded in Australia in 2015 by TV and radio host Jules Lund, who told me he was responding to the growing demand for branded content.

“Brands are desperate for content,” Lund said. “When you have a hundred customer profiles and the ability to be hyper personalized and targeted and social, you now need 100 beautiful pieces of content. Creative agencies can’t supply that at the right cost and the right turnaround, and stock images are the antithesis of personalization, because they don’t feature your brand.”

As for how Tribe differs from all the other influencer marketing companies out there, Lund noted that it’s a purely self-serve product, where brands post their requests — either for an “influencer campaign,” where the influencers are creating content and promoting it to their followers, or a “content campaign,” which is just about creating the content — then users submit their work and get paid if the brand decides to use it.

Plus, the brands on the platform aren’t sending free stuff to influencers who may or may not be a good fit. Instead, Tribe is connecting them with influencers who already own (and presumably like) their products.

“Tribe’s role is to simply unlock all of that branded content that sits within people’s iPhones and Samsungs,” Lund said. “The micro-influencers are looking in their pantry or their wardrobe, looking at the apps in their phones, all of these products that they already use.”

Tribe says it’s already working with brands like Unilever, L’Oréal and Marvel and generating more than $250,000 worth of branded content every day. And while the United Kingdom is currently the company’s biggest market, the United States already accounts for 20 percent of the more than 50,000 influencers on the platform.

With the new funding, Tribe is officially launching in the U.S. and opening an office at One World Trade Center in Manhattan, which will be led by CEO Anthony Svirskis. He said the money will also allow Tribe to continue investing in its product.

“With TRIBE we’re finally seeing influencer marketing done right,” said Chris Burch, founder and CEO of investor Burch Creative Capital, in a statement. “The U.S. market has been waiting for a tech platform like this for years and as soon as we heard they were launching stateside, we knew we needed to be a part of it.”

Hello Alfred — the startup that assigns in-home assistants to take care of your recurring chores and tasks — has announced the launch of a new service tier that will provide more properties and residents with access to the company’s underlying technology.

The company, which won the Startup Battlefield competition at our 2014 Disrupt event in San Francisco, looks to unlock valuable time for users by handling the long list of small routine items that add up over the course of a week and still require human oversight.

Hello Alfred partners with building owners to provide residents with dedicated home managers that assist with various errands and on-request services, such as apartment cleaning, grocery delivery, laundry services, prescription refills and more. Users have a direct line of communication with the company’s hospitality team through Hello Alfred’s mobile app, where they can manage tasks and set recurring appointments.

The new platform, “Powered by Alfred,” acts as a fairly similar but more accessible alternative to the company’s current offering. Residents in buildings equipped with “Powered by Alfred” are given access to all of the company’s solutions with the exception of the weekly visits from dedicated home managers currently included in the existing service. By excluding the dedicated in-home service, Hello Alfred is able to offer its new service tier at a lower price point and integrate with more buildings faster. 

Property owners using “Powered by Alfred” can customize packages to include the services that best fit the needs of their residents and can upgrade or change service levels at any time. Both residents and building owners using the new platform are also given more control and direct access to Hello Alfred’s proprietary technology, allowing users to control functions that normally fall under the purview of the company’s dedicated home managers.

Additionally, with the launch of the new offering, Hello Alfred will be consolidating its various solutions under one central app, where residents and building managers can handle all inquiries, appointments and payments.

The launch of “Powered by Alfred” seems to be a natural evolution for the company, which seeks to make its offering more accessible to all residents of all backgrounds.

Hello Alfred previously employed a consumer-facing business model, in which customers would pay a monthly subscription fee for the array of in-home services and access to the company’s team of hospitality specialists, referred to as Alfreds.

However, around the time of the startup’s Series B round, Hello Alfred adopted the model of partnering directly with property owners to offer its services complimentary to residents. The partnership structure was not only a more conducive model for scaling but also enabled the company to offer the same services to any resident in an Alfred-equipped building, regardless of socioeconomic status.

Hello Alfred quickly built up a sizeable backlog of property owners hoping to integrate the platform into their units, according to the company. However, the task of maintaining dedicated staffing for every unit in every location made it difficult for the Alfred team to satisfy its swelling demand, having to instead focus resources primarily on luxury properties.

With “Powered by Alfred” removing in-home management services, the company has been able to improve accessibility and better satisfy the market’s appetite for its services, now rolling out the offering to non-luxury buildings and properties that previously sat in its pipeline.

Behind the launch of the new platform — which the company has piloted over the course of several months — Hello Alfred has increased its market share by more than 50 percent, with its services now available in more than 150,000 residential properties.

“We want Alfred to be a utility. We want to make “help” a universal utility and make it something anyone can access,” Hello Alfred CEO and co-founder Marcela Sapone told TechCrunch. “We wanted to find a way where we could accelerate growth and get human-focused help into urban buildings to help most urban environments.”

The launch represents the latest step in Hello Alfred’s broader expansion plans, which appear to have ramped up in recent months. Hello Alfred is now active in 16 cities — including Houston, where the company plans to launch next week — with its new offering available across all of its active markets. The startup already boasts an impressive partnership roster that includes more than 20 of the largest property owners in the U.S., and the Alfred team expects its new offering to open up further opportunities for partnerships across different property classes and different stages of a resident’s life cycle.

“As WeWork transformed commercial real estate, Hello Alfred is transforming residential real estate, and redefining what it means to live in a city today,” said Sapone. “This business expansion allows us to not only satisfy increasing demand for our service, but to connect every part of the resident experience — from the moment you sign your lease, until the moment you move to another Hello Alfred building.”

To date, the company has raised just over $63.5 million in venture capital, according to data from PitchBook, from prestigious investment brands that include New Enterprise Associates, Spark Capital, SV Angel, Moderne Ventures, Invesco and others.

As we wrote last week in How Salesforce paved the way for the SaaS platform approach, the ability to build extensions, applications and even whole companies on top of the Salesforce platform set the stage and the bar for every SaaS company since. Vlocity certainly recognized that. Targeting five verticals, it built industry-specific CRM solutions on the Salesforce platform, and today announced a $60 million Series C round on a fat unicorn $1 billion valuation.

The round was led by Sutter Hill Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. New investors Bessemer Venture Partners and existing strategic investors Accenture and New York Life also participated. The company has now raised $163 million.

Company co-founder and CEO David Schmaier, whose extensive career includes stints with Siebel Systems and Oracle, says he and his co-founders (three of whom helped launch Veeva) wanted to take the idea of Veeva, which is a life sciences-focused company built on top of Salesforce, and extend that idea across five verticals instead of just one. Those five verticals include communications and media, insurance and financial services, health, energy and utilities and government and nonprofits.

The idea he said was to build a company with a market that was 10x the size of life sciences. “What we’re doing now is building five Veevas at once. If you could buy a product already tailored to the needs of your industry, why wouldn’t you do that?,” Schmaier said.

The theory seems to be working. He says that the company, which was founded in 2014, has already reached $100 million in revenue and expects to double that by the end of this year. Then of course, there is the unicorn valuation. While perhaps not as rare as it once was, reaching the $1 billion level is still a significant milestone for a startup.

In the Salesforce platform story, co-founder and CTO Parker Harris addressed the need for solutions like the ones from Veeva and Vlocity. “…Harris said they couldn’t build one Salesforce for healthcare and another for insurance and a third one for finance. We knew that wouldn’t scale, and so the platform [eventually] just evolved out of this really close relationship with our customers and the needs they had.” In other words, Salesforce made the platform flexible enough for companies like these to fill in the blanks.

“Vlocity is a perfect example of the incredible innovation occurring in the Salesforce ecosystem and how we are working together to provide customers in all industries the technologies they need to attract and serve customers in smarter ways,” Jujhar Singh, EVP and GM for Salesforce Industries said in a statement.

It’s also telling that of the three strategic investors in this round — New York Life, Accenture and Salesforce Ventures — Salesforce is the biggest investor, according to Schmaier.

The company has 150 customers, including investor New York Life, Verizon (which owns this publication), Cigna and the City of New York. It already has 700 employees in 20 countries. With this additional investment, you can expect those numbers to increase.

“What this Series C round allows us to do is to really put the gas on investing in product development, because verticals are all about going deep,” Schmaier said.

Arihant Patni is Managing Director at Ideaspring Capital, a fund focused on enterprise companies born in India and selling to the global market.

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McDonald’s is announcing an agreement to acquire personalization company Dynamic Yield.

The announcement does not include a price, but a source with knowledge of the deal said that it’s more than $300 million. This is the fast food chain’s largest acquisition in 20 years.

Dynamic Yield works with brands across e-commerce, travel, finance and media to create what’s been described as an Amazon-style personalized online experience.

McDonald’s said it will use this technology to create a drive-thru menu that can be tailored to things like the weather, current restaurant traffic and trending menu items. Once you’ve started ordering, the display can also recommend additional items based on what you’ve already chosen.

In fact, the company said it tested this in several U.S. locations in 2018. The plan is to start rolling this out across the United States in 2019, and then to move into international markets. McDonald’s also plans to integrate this technology into other digital products, like self-serve kiosks and the McDonald’s mobile app.

“Technology is a critical element of our Velocity Growth Plan, enhancing the experience for our customers by providing greater convenience on their terms,” said McDonald’s president and CEO Steve Easterbrook in a statement. “With this acquisition, we’re expanding both our ability to increase the role technology and data will play in our future and the speed with which we’ll be able to implement our vision of creating more personalised experiences for our customers.”

The plan that Easterbrook is referring to was first announced in March 2017, with a focus on technology like the McDonald’s mobile app and its Experience of the Future stores.

At the same time, McDonald’s said Dynamic Yield will continue to operate as a standalone company serving existing and future clients, and that it will continue to invest in the core personalization technology.

According to Crunchbase, Dynamic Yield has raised a total of $83.3 million from investors, including Innovation Endeavors, Bessemer Venture Partners and Marker Capital, as well as strategic backers like Naver (which owns the messaging apps Line and Snow), Baidu, The New York Times and Deutsche Telekom.

Before people ever use or buy your product, they’ll interact with your brand. What does your company stand for? How is your product different? Branding is an often overlooked, but essential component of communicating your company’s values, connecting with potential customers and, ultimately, driving conversions.  

But finding the right brand designer is hard. Depending on your budget, industry and scope, brand designer and brand agency services can vary widely. It’s a niche community, and brand designers who thrive in chaotic, fast-paced startup environments are rare.

We’re demystifying the world of brand design by covering how companies like Intercom approach their brand identity, and asking founders, like you, to nominate a talented brand designer or agency with whom they’ve collaborated. We’ll be publishing more branding articles, guest posts by industry experts and brand designer profiles in the weeks to come, but we need your help. We’re relying on your recommendations to identify which brand designers and agencies to feature.

We’re especially looking for people who have experience in these three categories:

We’re also interested in understanding how much time you’ve worked with a designer or agency, whether you’d recommend them to a friend and examples of their work.

Brand design is just one of our latest initiatives to identify the best service providers for startups. As we develop a shortlist of the top brand designers and agencies in the world, we’ll be asking them about their design philosophy, brand development process, rates and fees, and more. We’ll publish their profiles (along with your recommendations) on Extra Crunch.  

We’ll continue updating our database of brand designers on a rolling basis, but in the meantime, help us share this article and nominate a brand designer or agency you know and love.

Any thoughts or questions? Email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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Infinity Augmented Reality, an Israeli virtual reality startup, has been acquired by Alibaba, the companies announced this weekend. The deal’s terms were not disclosed. Alibaba and InfinityAR have had a strategic partnership since 2016, when Alibaba Group led InfinityAR’s Series C. Since then, the two have collaborated on augmented reality, computer vision and artificial intelligence projects.

Founded in 2013, the startup’s augmented glasses platform enables developers in a wide range of industries (retail, gaming, medical, etc.) to integrate AR into their apps. InfinityAR’s products include software for ODMs and OEMs and a SDK plug-in for 3D engines.

Alibaba’s foray into virtual reality started three years ago, when it invested in Magic Leap and then announced a new research lab in China to develop ways of incorporating virtual reality into its e-commerce platform.

InfinityAR’s research and development team will begin working out of Alibaba’s Israel Machine Laboratory, part of Alibaba DAMO Academy, the R&D initiative it is pouring $15 billion into with the goal of eventually serving two billion customers and creating 100 million jobs by 2036. DAMO Academy collaborates with universities around the world and Alibaba’s Israel Machine Laboratory has a partnership with Tel Aviv University focused on video analysis and machine learning.

In a press statement, the laboratory’s head, Lihi Zelnik-Manor, said “Alibaba is delighted to be working with InfinityAR as one team after three years of partnership. The talented team brings unique knowhow in sensor fusion, computer vision and navigation technologies. We look forward to exploring these leading technologies and offering additional benefits to customers, partners and developers.”

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