The Wing opened its doors to entrepreneurial women in New York City in 2016 with the support of about $2.5 million in seed funding, marketing itself as a place for women of diverse backgrounds to meet and do work. Now, as it officially amends its membership policy to allow all genders — yes, men included — it will have to work harder to stay true to its promise and purpose: to create a feminist co-working empire.

In two years, The Wing built a committed social media following and launched an in-house magazine and an online store offering merchandise adorned with third-wave feminist catchphrases. It established additional co-working spaces in New York, Washington, DC and San Francisco and entered into financial agreements with high-profile venture capitalists. Just three weeks ago, The Wing company announced a $75 million Sequoia-led Series C funding that more than doubled the New York-based female-founded startup’s previous valuation to $375 million, according to PitchBook.

While The Wing grew its community of female-identifying, non-binary and gender non-conforming members to more than 6,000, debates surrounding its anti-male doctrine sprang up on and off the internet. Men aren’t allowed in The Wing — is that legal? Many questioned. No, probably not. Why? Because as much as The Wing disguises itself as a social club, it’s technically too large to benefit from laws that actually permit those sorts of groups to practice gender discrimination, according to a Jezebel report. So yes, male-only social clubs were able to thrive for decades because they were lean — small enough to legally discriminate. Still, there’s no reason The Wing needed to bar men from accessing its properties and resources, other than the fact that there have been protected male safe-havens promoting business and entrepreneurship for a very long time, while female-focused rooms of that sort have been few and far between.

Thought pieces were written, Tweets were sent and the New York City Commission on Human Rights opened a “commission-initiated investigation,” which is still ongoing, according to The Wing. Then a man by the name of James Pietrangelo filed a $12 million lawsuit against The Wing alleging its “illegal discrimination against men … was/is egregious: brazen, flagrant, intentional, willful, wanton, actually malicious, motivated by evil and ill-will, deliberately oppressive, outrageous, and willfully and callus disregardful of the rights of men.”

Pietrangelo takes issue with essentially every piece of The Wing’s DNA: its slogans, decor, schemes and employees. “The Wing’s brazen attitude towards the law and the civil rights of men can be summed up by one of The Wing’s own favorite slogans: “Girls Doing Whatever The F*ck They Want,” the lawsuit states.

“Of the 53 corporate and/or front-of-the-house positions, identified on the wing’s About page of its website, all 53 are women — arguably a statistical impossibility if the wing is not discriminating based on sex and/or gender-identity,” it continues — however The Wing says it also employs men and non-binary individuals. It should be noted that Pietrangelo is the dictionary definition of litigious. He has brought forth many lawsuits, including one in which he sued the city of Avon Lake because a local skate park was too loud and another against the Alvas Corporation in Vermont for the mishandling of deli meat.

Now, The Wing says it’s altered its membership policy to allow access to anyone, as first reported by Insider. The company, however, said the transition has been planned for some time as a result of conversations with trans and non-binary members and is not a result of the ongoing lawsuit: “The membership policy was codified and adopted before the lawsuit,” a spokesperson for The Wing told TechCrunch.

“Gender identity and gender presentation are two distinct concepts and do not always align,” co-founder and chief executive Audrey Gelman wrote in a letter to members announcing the policy amendment. “To that end, we’ve made some internal updates and adopted written membership policies to ensure that our staff is trained not to make assumptions about someone’s identity based on how they present, or to ask prospective members or guests to self-identify. We initiated these trainings and policies so that we can continue to build a community that reflects our values and pushes us all to be more inclusive.”

As for how new membership policies will change The Wing’s female-friendly environment and community of women, that’s to be determined. The company is still figuring out just how it will ensure any new members believe and respect its mission of promoting women.

Ultimately, The Wing’s decision to open up membership is good business. Given that it is a space meant for entrepreneurs to get work done, it makes sense that it would be inclusive of all genders, as women and non-binary folk often build businesses with cisgender males, too. The Riveter, another female-focused co-working startup, has allowed men in from the very beginning for that very reason.

“I don’t think the future is female, I think the future is fluid,” The Riveter founder and CEO Amy Nelson told TechCrunch last month. “Gender is becoming an outdated idea but at the same time, it’s important to think of women when we build these spaces … There is a lot of value to women’s only spaces but our take on it is we want to redefine the future of work for women and we want everyone to be part of it.”

Despite demonstrating a certain brand of millennial feminism that isn’t inclusive or appealing to all, The Wing has been very blatant about its diversity and inclusion efforts since its beginning. Sure, it’s learned and adapted along the way, but considering the dearth of attempts in Silicon Valley to create safe spaces for women or to fund women’s businesses, The Wing’s efforts to promote women should be encouraged rather than torn down.

The company formerly known as WeWork has rebranded as the We Company — although a better name for its network of on-demand office spaces for the newly incorporated and nominally employed, co-living spaces for the same easyJet-set and educational and coding services could be “House of Cards.”

News of the rebranding (first reported via Fast Company) comes on the heels of reports that the company would no longer be receiving a planned $16 billion golden parachute to escape a soon-to-be-sinking real estate market investment from longtime backer Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank and his SoftBank Vision Fund.

WeWork, which lost $1.2 billion over the first three quarters of 2018 according to an FT report, is rebranding to shift attention from its real estate play to a broader blend of living and educational services that now comprise the three pillars of its business (to be clear, the largest pillar is its real estate properties).

The knock against the company has always been that it was a real estate investment masquerading as a tech company (a case which FT made magisterially last year).

In the blog post, WeWork chief executive Adam Neumann laid out the company’s new strategy, which divides the company into three different business lines: WeWork (real estate), WeLive (its co-living spaces) and WeGrow (for education).

For the We Company to succeed, a few things need to happen. Revenue needs to rebalance to the WeLive and WeGrow businesses quickly and it needs to grow its services even more aggressively. And the result of each needs to be actual profitability.

There aren’t a lot of really hard metrics to gauge the company’s current performance. But the good people at Bloomberg did uncover actual financial data on the company’s debt, which is underperforming compared to industry benchmarks.

Neumann said the original vision of the company was an all-encompassing network of offerings that would help customers bank, shop, live and play. That’s a mighty goal worthy of a Vision Fund, but its vision may turn out to be a fever dream if the indicators are right and the worldwide slide into recession finally happens.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here:

1. IBM unveils its first commercial quantum computer

The 20-qubit system combines the quantum and classical computing parts it takes to use a machine like this for research and business applications into a single package. While it’s worth stressing that the 20-qubit machine is nowhere near powerful enough for most commercial applications, IBM sees this as the first step towards tackling problems that are too complex for classical systems.

2. Apple’s trillion-dollar market cap was always a false idol

Nothing grows forever, not even Apple. Back in August we splashed headlines across the globe glorifying Apple’s brief stint as the world’s first $1 trillion company, but in the end it didn’t matter. Fast-forward four months and Apple has lost more than a third of its stock value, and last week the company lost $75 billion in market cap in a single day.

3. GitHub Free users now get unlimited private repositories

Starting today, free GitHub users will now get unlimited private projects with up to three collaborators. Previously, GitHub had a caveat for its free users that code had to be public if they didn’t pay for the service.

4. Uber’s IPO may not be as eye-popping as we expected

Uber’s public debut later this year is undoubtedly the most anticipated IPO of 2019, but the company’s lofty valuation (valued by some as high as $120 billion) has some investors feeling uneasy.

5. Amazon is getting more serious about Alexa in the car with Telenav deal

Amazon has announced a new partnership with Telenav, a Santa Clara-based provider of connected car services. The collaboration will play a huge role in expanding Amazon’s ability to give drivers relevant information and furthers the company’s mission to bake Alexa into every aspect of your life.

6. I used VR in a car going 90 mph and didn’t get sick

The future of in-vehicle entertainment could be VR. Audi announced at CES that it’s rolling out a new company called Holoride to bring adaptive VR entertainment to cars. The secret sauce here is matching VR content to the slight movements of the vehicle to help those who often get motion sickness.

7. Verizon and T-Mobile call out AT&T over fake 5G labels

Nothing like some CES drama to start your day. AT&T recently shared a shady marketing campaign that labeled its 4G networks as 5G and rivals Verizon and T-Mobile are having none of it.

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 427th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, January 10, 2019, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about your definition of seed. What do you like to invest in stage-wise? I’ll pre-qualify that question by giving you some context. At least in Silicon Valley, seed has...

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According to a recent report, the global talent management software market is estimated to grow 18% annually to $29.7 billion from $7.9 billion in 2017. Talent management software provides HR teams...

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Scape Technologies, a London-based computer vision startup, is de-cloaking today to announce that it has raised $8 million in seed funding and is launching the first iteration of its “Visual Positioning Service,” which lets developers build apps that require location accuracy far beyond the capabilities of GPS alone.

The technology will initially target augmented reality apps, but also can be used to power applications in mobility, logistics and robotics. More broadly, Scape wants to enable any machine equipped with a camera to understand its surroundings.

Backing the round is LocalGlobe, Mosaic Ventures, Fly Ventures and company builder Entrepreneur First. Scape Technologies was a member of EF cohort 7, which pitched at EF’s London demo day almost two years ago. The startup has remained pretty stealthy ever since. Until now, that is.

“There is a huge amount of hype in the AR space right now, which is why we’ve been working for the last two years in stealth, taking our time to make sure our technology is accurate, robust and scalable,” Scape Technologies co-founder and CEO Edward Miller tells TechCrunch. “We set out on a mission to build a new type of infrastructure, to allow computers to safely interpret and navigate the world, using only a camera. To make this possible, we’ve built what we refer to as our ‘Vision Engine,’ which lies at the heart of everything we do at Scape.”

Miller describe’s Scape’s “Vision Engine” as a large-scale mapping pipeline that creates 3D maps from ordinary images and video. Camera devices can then query the Vision Engine using the startup’s newly launched Visual Positioning Service API to determine their exact location with far greater precision than GPS can ever provide. Starting today, the Visual Positioning Service is available within London for select partners via Scape’s SDK.

The fact that Scape’s 30-person-plus team has been able to build a detailed 3D map of London is slightly head-scratching, and that’s before factoring in the machine learning and computer vision technology required to enable machines to reference that map to accurately pinpoint “hyper location.” Miller declines to go into much detail on record with regards to how the young company was able to pull off such a large mapping exercise, for fear of giving away too much of the startup’s secret sauce.

However, it is noteworthy that Miller was one of the U.K.’s first Street View photographers, giving him a unique insight into how a company like Google can build maps at scale. He also has a background in interactive imagery, having been involved in VR projects for companies such as ESPN, UEFA and Jaguar. Scape’s other co-founder and CTO, Huub Heijnen, was previously a researcher in the field of robotics, where he was involved in teaching multi-legged robots how to learn to walk. “It’s pretty hardcore,” says Miller of his co-founder’s previous work.

Teaching a computer to “see” the world with a camera is no small task, either. Whereas humans might see a photograph and recognise in it a car or a building, a computer only sees a bunch of ones and zeros. The role of computer vision is to interpret these ones and zeros into something meaningful.

“We’ve had to make significant technological breakthroughs to allow computers to recognise their location accurately, quickly and in varying weather conditions,” explains Miller. “Most importantly, we’ve invested significant efforts in ensuring our Visual Engine is scalable. The world is a big place and we can’t afford to rely on a system that can’t grow with demand. Unlike other approaches, Scape’s Vision Engine scales horizontally to hundreds of servers at a time, so we can provide our Visual Positioning Service within areas the size of an entire city.”

More ambitious still, enabling accurate location is “just the beginning.” Over the next five years, Scape plans to develop what it calls “ubiquitous spatial intelligence,” which will allow devices to understand where they are and what is around them, using only a camera. The thinking is that with exponential growth in IoT and wearables, the world is becoming increasingly augmented with physical hardware designed to live and operate amongst us.

“With new industries like augmented reality and self-driving cars on the rise, it’s vital that these new types of computers understand with extreme precision where they are and what’s around them,” cautions Scape’s CEO.

Over the last decade and more, I’ve had the privilege of working with a large number of bootstrapped entrepreneurs. These include self-financed companies and also modestly capitalized startups that...

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Several weeks after it was reported by the WSJ that two of the biggest investors in SoftBank’s massive Vision Fund vehicle were cool on its planned $16 billion investment in the coworking company WeWork, those plans have changed radically, says the Financial Times.

According to its sources — and confirmed by our own — SoftBank is now in “detailed negotiations” to invest a comparatively modest $2 billion more into WeWork, plans that could be firmed up as soon as the end of this week.

A WeWork spokesperson at the company’s New York headquarters declined to comment.

The development is both surprising and unsurprising. The government-backed funds of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, which committed $45 billion and $15 billion, respectively, to the Vision Fund, haven’t been been known before to push back against the person pulling its levers, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son .

Indeed, given the vast sums of money that the Vision Fund has put to work since being announced in late 2016, it seemed there were few if any checks on Son or the 80-plus people who work for the Vision Fund.

Just some of its many bold bets include, most recently, a $500 million investment in Cambridge Mobile Telematics, an eight-year-old, Boston-area company that previously raised just one round of funding of less than $20 million to build out its technology. The Vision Fund also recently led a $400 million round into Emeryville, Ca.-based Zymergen, which manufacturers molecules for a wide array of industries and already counted SoftBank as an investor.

Still, according to that Journal piece, the two anchor investors were less enthusiastic about a giant new investment in nearly nine-year-old WeWork for numerous reasons, including that they see WeWork as a real estate play and both already have plenty of real estate in their portfolios; that WeWork CEO Adam Neumann would still control the company even while SoftBank was looking to acquire a majority stake; and because SoftBank has already committed $8 billion into WeWork in recent years, including through an agreement last year to invest a fresh $4 billion into the company via a convertible note and a $3 billion warrant that gave it the right to buy additional equity in WeWork.

As it stands, including the $2 billion that WeWork looks to receive from SoftBank imminently, SoftBank will have sunk $10 billion into the company. Perhaps it’s no wonder that the newest $2 billion is not coming from the Vision Fund but from SoftBank directly. (Son sometimes invests off SoftBank’s balance sheet directly, for expediency’s sake and, presumably, in a case such as this one, when there may be pushback from Vision Fund investors.)

Either way, $2 billion more from SoftBank is “hardly a stinging rebuke” of WeWork or its business model, says one person familiar with SoftBank’s thinking. This same source also notes that the $16 billion figure bandied about late last year was “never a lock. There were always numerous options on the table.”

Whether SoftBank regrets what remains a huge bet can only be known in time. A shifting public market certainly seems like reason for worry, given that unprofitable WeWork relies increasingly on freely spending corporate customers for its revenue, including both companies that install their employees at WeWork’s coworking spaces, and those that license the company’s technology and aesthetic to WeWork-ify their own offices.

Unsurprisingly, Neumann, when asked how WeWork would fare in a downturn, told us at a Disrupt event in 2017 that it was positioned perfectly. “Business is a flexible thing,” he’d said at the time. “Space is fixed. Being able to give people that flexibility if a recession comes or when a recession comes is actually going to be a very needed product.”

According to the FT, SoftBank’s earlier plans for WeWork included SoftBank and the Vision Fund paying $10 billion to buy out all outside investors in WeWork. A further $6 billion would have been injected directly into the company, including a $2 billion commitment this year, and a commitment to invest a further $4 billion based on agreed-up performance targets for WeWork in 2020 and 2021.

Our sources say that, as of this writing, the $2 billion being discussed will be split evenly to purchase both primary and secondary shares from earlier investors. We’re also told that the company’s post-money valuation, assuming this newest deal is completed, will be $47 billion, a total that includes $1 billion that Softbank invested in WeWork last year via that convertible note and the $3 billion more than the SoftBank committed last year to invest in the company this year.

WeWork’s losses in the first nine months of 2018 nearly quadrupled from a year earlier to $1.2 billion, says the FT, which says it viewed an investor presentation. The company’s sales meanwhile hit $1.5 billion during the same period.

Uber is expected to raise $10 billion later this year in one of the largest U.S. initial public offerings in history. The float will value the ride-hailing giant somewhere between $76 billion — the valuation it garnered with its last private financing — and $120 billion — a sky-high figure assigned by Wall Street bankers that’s had even early Uber investors scratching their heads.

A new report from The Information pegs Uber’s initial market cap at $90 billion. To develop the estimate, the site analyzed undisclosed documents Uber provided creditors in 2017 “in which the company projected it would double net revenue to $14.2 billion by 2019,” ran revenue multiples and compared Uber to GrubHub, which investors say is the business’s closest comparison.

Uber declined to comment on The Information’s analysis.

How we got here

Uber confidentially filed for its long-awaited IPO last month, marking the beginning of a race to the stock markets between it and U.S. competitor Lyft, which filed just hours before, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. Founded in 2009 by Travis Kalanick, Uber has brought in about $20 billion in a combination of debt and equity funding. It counts SoftBank as its largest shareholder in a cap table that also lists Toyota, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, TPG Growth and many more. As for the skepticism surrounding Uber’s lofty $120 billion valuation, the eye-popping figure seems unachievable considering the company isn’t profitable and has and continues to burn through cash.

An IPO that large would certainly make its investors happy. First Round Capital, for example, seeded Uber with $1.6 million in the company’s first two funding rounds in 2010 and 2011, according to The Wall Street Journal. At a $120 billion valuation, First Round’s shares would be worth some $5 billion. The venture capital firm, however, sold some of its shares to SoftBank alongside Benchmark, which itself would otherwise own shares worth about $14 billion.

Bradley Tusk, an early Uber investor who signed on to help the company surmount political and regulatory barriers in 2011, own shares said to be worth $100 million, though he too gave up 42 percent of his equity in a secondary sale to SoftBank, he recently told TechCrunch.

“I’m quite happy with the 120 number,” Tusk said. “But … I am a little surprised by [it], it does seem to be a really aggressive number.”

“Any investment in Uber is obviously a long-term bet on the future, like someone who invested in Amazon in the early days,” Tusk added. “One thing [Uber chief executive officer Dara Khosrowshahi] is doing well is really expanding Uber into a mobility company as opposed to just a ride-hailing company.”

A long-term bet on the future

Uber has opted to go public in a year poised to see the most high-flying unicorn IPOs in history. As we’ve reported in great detail on this site, both Lyft and Uber are planning to float, as are Slack and Pinterest . Many of these companies, however, made the call to make their public markets debut before the stock market took a quick turn south. Poor performing stocks may discourage unicorns from emerging from their cozy VC-protected stalls.

Uber will garner increased scrutiny from Wall Street investors as they begin to parse out its true value. Fortunately the company, which like Amazon has long prioritized growth over profit, has “’clear levers’ it could pull in order to turn on the cash spigots if it wanted to, by reducing its marketing spending both in the U.S. and developing markets and by finding partners to help finance its self-driving car development,” according to The Information. “Pulling those levers would slow revenue growth by a third—from a 33% growth in net revenue to 22 percent growth in net revenue in 2019 [but] it would save Uber $2 billion annually.”

In its third quarter 2018 financial results, Uber posted a net loss of $939 million on a pro forma basis and an adjusted EBITDA loss of $527 million, up about 21 percent quarter-over-quarter. Revenue for Q3 was up five percent QoQ at $2.95 billion and up 38 percent year-over-year.

“We had another strong quarter for a business of our size and global scope,” Uber chief financial officer Nelson Chai said in a statement. “As we look ahead to an IPO and beyond, we are investing in future growth across our platform, including in food, freight, electric bikes and scooters, and high-potential markets in India and the Middle East where we continue to solidify our leadership position.”

We can speculate on Uber’s valuation for days but ultimately Wall Street will determine just how high Uber will go. For now, all we can do is sit and wait for the company to relinquish its S-1 to the masses.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here:

1. Nvidia launches the $349 GeForce RTX 2060

Nvidia broke with tradition and put a new focus on gaming at CES. Last night the company unveiled the RTX 2060, a $349 low-end version of its new Turing-based desktop graphics cards. The RTX 2060 will be available on Jan. 15.

2. Elon Musk’s vision of spaceflight is gorgeous 

This spring SapceX intends to launch the next phase in its space exploration plans. The newly named Starship rocket, previously known as the BFR, intends to to be rocket to rule them all. And it’s going to look good doing it.

3. Apple’s increasingly tricky international trade-offs

Far from its troubles in emerging markets like China, Apple is starting to face backlash from a European population that’s crying foul over the company’s perceived hypocrisy on data privacy. It’s become clear that Apple’s biggest success is now its biggest challenge in Europe.

4. Marc Andreessen: audio will be “titanically important” and VR will be “1,000” times bigger than AR

In a recently recorded podcast Marc Andreesen gave some predictions on the future of the tech industry. Surprisingly, the all-start investor is continuing his support of the shaky VR industry saying that expanding the immersive world will require us to remove the head-mounted displays we’ve become accustomed to.

5. Fitness marketplace ClassPass acquires competitor GuavaPass

ClassPass, the five-year-old fitness marketplace, is in the midst of an expansion sprint. The company announced yesterday that it’s acquiring one it competitors, GuavaPass, for an undisclosed amount to expand into Asia. The move now puts ClassPass in more than 80 markets across the 11 countries, with plans to expand to 50 new cities in 2019.

6. Apple shows off new smart home products from HomeKit partners

Apple gave a snapshot of its future smart home ecosystem at CES. Looks like an array of smart light switches, door cameras, electrical outlets and more are on the way and will be configurable through the Home app and Siri.

7. Parcel Guard’s smart mailbox protects your packages from porch thieves

Danby is showing off its newly launched smart mailbox called Parcel Guard at CES, which allows deliveries to be left securely at customers’ doorsteps. Turns out you won’t need a farting glitter bomb to protect your packages after all. The Parcel Guard starts at $399 and pre-orders are will be available this week.

George Spencer, Senior Managing Director at Seyen Capital, invests in SaaS companies, mostly in the Midwest, from a small fund out of Chicago. The interview contains an excellent discussion on ideal...

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Standard Cognition helps retail stores stand up to Jeff Bezos’ juggernaut. The $50 million-funded autonomous checkout startup is racing to equip bigger shops with scanless payment technology that lets customers walk out the door without ever stopping at a cashier. While Amazon Go opens its own 2,000 square foot boutiques, Standard Cognition is working on outfitting 20,000 square foot and larger drug stores and grocers. That led Standard Cognition to make its first acquisition, Explorer.ai.

Why would an automated checkout company acquire a self-driving car startup? Because whether you’re tracking shoppers or pedestrians, you need sophisticated maps of the real world. The more accurate the machine vision is, the larger the store you can equip. And since Standard Cognition uses ceiling-based cameras instead of putting them on every shelf like Amazon, it’s much cheaper to keep eyes on a bigger space.

Standard Cognition is only just over a year old, but with the backing of Y Combinator, Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan’s Initialized Capital, and a fast-moving team of seven co-founders, it believes it can outmaneuver Amazon. That means doing whatever it can to leap forward. Standard Cognition already had in-house mapping technology, but Explorer.ai’s team and tech could accelerate its quest to bring even 100,000 sq ft big box supercenters into the automated checkout age.

“It’s the wild west — applying cutting-edge, state-of-the-art machine learning research that’s hot off the press. We read papers then implement it weeks after it’s published, putting the ideas out into the wild and making them production-worthy — taking it from state-of-the-art to dumb machines you can kick and they won’t fall over.” says Standard Cognition co-founder and CEO Jordan Fisher. “It’s no easy task and the exactness we’re going to require will only increase. Having a world-class team of engineers and researchers that can build the next generation version of our mapping is why we’re so excited to have the team joining us.”

From AV To AC

Explorer.ai is was founded in 2017 too, and its acquisition so soon is a testament to how hot the autonomous driving and checkout markets are. Akshay Goel, Nagasrikanth Kallakuri, and Tushar Dadlani noticed self-driving vehicle startups were all trying to generate their own maps. They cobbled together data from several providers, built maps specifically for different purposes, and soon had fellow startups trying to throw money at them. They raised just under $1 million from Story Ventures, early Facebook engineer Nick Heyman and more, growing the team to seven employees.

But eventually Explorer.ai realized the bigger players were too cautious to rely on outside maps and it could be years before they’d be comfortable with the idea. “Our view is it would take quite a while to become a commercial success in mapping for autonomous vehicles” Goel tells me. “Most of the companies we were working with in partnerships tried to acquire us from an early stage. Should we fundraise more or start looking at the acquisition process?” the team asked itself as its cash dwindled.

Explorer.ai got a few terms sheets for funding, but weren’t sure they’d be able to go to market fast enough. The founders shopped the startup around “to pretty much everyone” Goel says, though they refused to name names when I asked if that included natural acquirers like Uber and Google’s Waymo. But then they took a left turn into retail. “What we saw was that essentially since autonomous checkout has a lot fewer safety issues, [Standard Cognition] could go to market much faster, and mapping had a large impact on autonomous checkout.”

The two companies declined to disclose financial terms of the deal, but Fisher tells me “We can definitely say it was a competitive process and we’re excited that we could win the hearts and minds of the Explorer team.” They’ll join Standard Cognition’s 40-plus employees as the work on pilots for US and Japanese retail locations. Goel adds that “the investors, founders, and team are happy”, implying the payout more than returned the money it’d raised.

The big question Standard Cognition’s customers are asking are whether autonomous checkout is cost-effective, simple for customers to understand, and won’t let shoplifters destroy their margins. That means minimizing installation fees, perfecting onboarding and instruction, and recognizing the difference between someone putting an item back on the shelf versus into their jacket. The startup believes that done right, human cashiers can be repurposed as concierges that help customers find what they’re looking for and buy more without having to stand in line.

“How do you make this a bulletproof, reproducible system that works as well as a till in a grocery store that no one worries about breaking?” is the challenge Fisher and his new compatriots must solve. “Amazon is pursuing what we call as shelf-based approach with sensors every few inches on every shelf. What’s not great is the expense, the complexity of the electrical and compute systems . . . this is why you’re seeing autonomous checkout applied to Amazon Go and not larger Whole Foods stores. Not from a lack of desire from Amazon, but because it’s not technologically tenable with the approach that they’re taking. I’m confident they’ll tackle that challenge in the next few years but today they’re limited by their technology.”

And so Standard Cognition is pushing as fast as it can build a lead and brand by giving independent retail stores and chains the firepower to fight off Amazon. Standard Cognition will also have to outcompete fellow autonomous checkout startups like ex-Pandora CTO Will Glaser’s Grabango, which announced it’d raised $12 million today. Grabango now has signed deals with four U.S. retail chains up to 25,000 sq ft in size and has 37 employees. There’s also fellow Y Combinator startup Inokyo with a pop-up shop in Mountain View; and Trigo Vision that has a deal with an israeli grocery chain for more than 200 stores.

“I wasn’t thinking we’d do any acquisitions a month ago” Fisher reveals. “Our goal is not just to deliver autonomous checkout to the world but to do it phenomenally quickly. We’re at the beginning of a space race. Two to three years from now, I think this will be potentially as crowded as autonomous vehicles. We’re in the lead today but that’s not enough for us. We need to be light-years ahead to capture as much of the market as we want. [With the Explorer.ai acquisition] how many days does this advance us? How much further along on our roadmap for world domination does this bring us? When we sat down, it was tangible, the real progression of the roadmap.”

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Spencer Crawley was recorded in November 2018....

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Last month, Amy and I matched all of the Colorado first time DonorsChoose.org projects. So far, 103 projects have been fully funded, with a total of $25,722 donated. We still have plenty of matching dollars out there, so we’ll continue to run this match for a while.

In the meantime, I started talking to my friends at Sphero about doing something similar for all the DonorsChoose.org projects that have a Sphero as part of them. They got excited about it and have announced a $110,000 gift to Donorschoose.org to match anyone who donates to any of the 200+ teachers on Donorschoose.org who have Sphero products included in their projects.

Amy and I, through our Anchor Point Foundation, joined Silicon Valley Bank, Needham & Company, Flex Logistics, Nasco, and my partners at Foundry Group, in providing the funding for the match. SVB, Needham, Flex, and Nasco are Sphero business partners and I deeply appreciate their support of Sphero, DonorsChoose.org, and all of the teachers we are helping fund.

If you want to support a teacher who has a Sphero-related project for their classroom, jump in now. And, if you are a teacher who wants to do something around Sphero’s STEM-related robots and software, including Sphero BOLT, Sphero Mini, and the newly-released Sphero Specdrums, join DonorsChoose.org and put up a project today! Finally, if you are a Sphero business partner and want to participate in this, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and I’ll get you in the mix.

This match will continue until the dollars are used up. Amy and I are incredibly proud of our friends at Sphero, along with their partners SVB, Needham, Flex, and Nasco, as well as my own partners at Foundry Group, for helping teachers get more STEM-related activities in their classroom through DonorsChoose.org.

The post Sphero’s Contribution to DonorsChoose.org appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

The curse of open source software is that it is used in pretty much every application and device on the planet, and yet, has pretty much no business model. Sustaining open source is a critical problem for the future of software, because without a durable source of income, the developers behind these critical projects cannot invest their full energies to improve, maintain, and secure them.

Tidelift, a startup founded by a group of long-time open source engineers and executives, has taken on the problem in a compelling way. As I wrote about them last year as part of a deep dive into open source sustainability:

Tidelift is designed to offer assurances “around areas like security, licensing, and maintenance of software,” [Tidelift CEO Donald] Fischer explained. The idea has its genesis in Red Hat, which commercialized Linux. The idea is that companies are willing to pay for open source when they can receive guarantees around issues like critical vulnerabilities and long-term support. In addition, Tidelift handles the mundane tasks of setting up open source for commercialization such as handling licensing issues.

That’s pretty much still the mission of the company, and now it has even more resources to grow. The company announced today that it has raised $25 million in Series B financing led by return backers General Catalyst, Foundry Group, and Matthew Szulik, the former chairman and CEO of open source leader Red Hat, which was acquired by IBM last year in a blockbuster $34 billion deal. That’s a follow-up to a $15 million Series A round last year.

Since I covered Tidelift last June, the company has expanded from its initial launch in the Javascript ecosystem to also offer assurances to packages within the Java, Python, PHP, .NET, and Ruby ecosystems. Among the well-known open-source projects covered under the Tidelift Subscription today are Apache Struts, Vue.js, Gulp, Carbon, Jekyll, Beautiful Soup, and Mongoose. Tidelift says that its subscription now cover hundreds of open source packages.

In addition to covering more packages, Tidelift announced last September that they had reached $1 million in open source maintainer commitments. In a press release, the company highlighted community and discussion platform Discourse as a customer.

CEO Fischer told me that “Our bottom line is that open source doesn’t just need ‘funding.’ It needs a business model that works for creators and users alike, at massive scale.” The company intends to use the new funding to further expand its coverage of popular open source packages and partner with more open source creators.

According to Crisil, online grocery in India is expected to grow between 65-70% annually to $1.4 billion by 2020. According to market intelligence provider Kalagato, BigBasket leads the online...

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Pouch, the U.K.-based money-saving browser extension, has been acquired by German ‘publishing technology’ platform Global Savings Group.

Exact financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I understand it to be a cash purchase and in the 7-figure U.S. dollar range, plus performance related bonuses.

The entire Pouch team are joining Global Savings Group, and founders Ben Corrigan, Jonny Plein, and Vikram Simha will continue working on Pouch as its “Global Product Leads”.

Launched publicly in September 2016, Pouch is best known for its shopping tool that automatically alerts buyers to working voucher codes as they visit over 3,000 U.K. e-commerce sites. The Pouch browser extension is available for Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox. It’s free to download.

Last year, the company garnered a nice PR boost after appearing on the BBC television show Dragons’ Den. This included receiving investment offers from all five Dragons, culminating in an offer of £75,000 in exchange for 18 percent equity split between Touker Suleyman, Jenny Campbell and Tej Lalvani. However, as is quite common in Dragons’ Den, the deal ultimately fell through, with Pouch eventually seeking equity financing on better terms elsewhere.

The London startup was backed by a consortium of angels, including Andreas Zollmann, and had raised just £345,000 in total. Pouch also won the MassChallenge prize and went through the Huckeltree Alpha Programme in 2017 and the Natwest Entrepreneur Accelerator programme in 2018.

Meanwhile, Global Savings Group’s acquisition of Pouch looks like a decent fit. The company offers commerce content to help publishers find additional routes to monetisation. It operates over 100 digital assets for various leading publishers globally. In the U.K., this includes powering discount voucher sites for Daily Mail and Metro, delivering “inspirations, recommendations, deals and discounts” to consumers.

Regarding Pouch, Global Savings Group says it will incorporate the product into its white label offering for publishers in multiple markets.

“Pouch allows our users to shop with the confidence that they are always getting the biggest saving, without wasting time searching for deals across the internet,” says Pouch co-founder Jonny Plein in a statement. “We are incredibly excited to join the Global Savings Group family and continue to improve our products and build new tools that help people save time and money when shopping online”.

We wish all our readers a very Happy New Year! With CES just round the corner, we bring you this feature from TechCrunch on the Best and Worst Gadgets of 2018. For this week’s posts, click on the...

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