In early 2021, a Nuro autonomous delivery vehicle pulled to a halt at a four-way stop in its hometown of Mountain View, California to let a user cross. This seemingly humdrum moment quickly looked like a decidedly science fiction storyline — the user was a small sidewalk robot from another startup on its own mission.

“Obviously, we yielded to it, but it was, wow, we have entered a different world,” said Amy Jones Satrom, head of Operations at Nuro.

Mountain View is home to competitor Waymo and other autonomous vehicle testing activity. But for those who want to take part in that science fiction scene, Houston provides the full experience.

Waymo is testing self-driving trucks in Houston, and a fully driverless shuttle service is due to start public service there early next year. Nuro’s Texas effort started in April, when an R2 robot began its commercial pizza delivery service in partnership with Domino’s. Some customers ordering pizzas from the Domino’s Woodland Heights store will see the option to have their pies delivered by robot.

Customers can trace the progress of the self-driving vehicle on the Domino’s app and, when it pulls up outside their home, tap in a unique PIN on its touchscreen to access their order. Nuro is also operating in Houston with Kroger supermarkets and FedEx.

“One of the things we laugh about is how customers constantly talk to the bot,” Dennis Maloney, Domino’s chief innovation pfficer said. “It’s almost like they think it’s ‘Knight Rider.’ It’s very common for customers to thank it or say goodbye, which is great because that indicates we’re creating an engaging experience that they’re not frustrated by.”

Creating an experience, where people want to chat with their new robot neighbors instead of chasing them down the street with pitchforks, falls to Jones Satrom’s operations team. It has to delicately balance speed, safety, convenience and congestion, even as Nuro embarks on a growth spurt that will see robots spreading to other cities, states and partners in the months ahead.

Here’s how it manages that, and what the future holds for Nuro’s ever-so-gentle robot invasion.

Mapping the territory

Few people are as well suited to overseeing Nuro’s high-stakes robot rollout as Jones Satrom, who started her career as a nuclear engineer on an aircraft carrier and previously managed the integration of Kiva Systems’ robots into Amazon’s warehouses.

Cisco announced on Friday that it’s acquiring Israeli applications-monitoring startup Epsagon at a price pegged at $500 million. The purchase gives Cisco a more modern microservices-focused component for its growing applications-monitoring portfolio.

The Israeli business publication Globes reported it had gotten confirmation from Cisco that the deal was for $500 million, but Cisco would not confirm that price with TechCrunch.

The acquisition comes on top of a couple of other high-profile app-monitoring deals, including AppDynamics, which the company bought in 2018 for $3.7 billion, and ThousandEyes, which it nabbed last year for $1 billion.

With Epsagon, the company is getting a way to monitor more modern applications built with containers and Kubernetes. Epsagon’s value proposition is a solution built from the ground up to monitor these kinds of workloads, giving users tracing and metrics, something that’s not always easy to do given the ephemeral nature of containers.

As Cisco’s Liz Centoni wrote in a blog post announcing the deal, Epsagon adds to the company’s concept of a full-stack offering in their applications-monitoring portfolio. Instead of having a bunch of different applications monitoring tools for different tasks, the company envisions one that works together.

“Cisco’s approach to full-stack observability gives our customers the ability to move beyond just monitoring to a paradigm that delivers shared context across teams and enables our customers to deliver exceptional digital experiences, optimize for cost, security and performance and maximize digital business revenue,” Centoni wrote.

That experience point is particularly important because when an application isn’t working, it isn’t happening in a vacuum. It has a cascading impact across the company, possibly affecting the core business itself and certainly causing customer distress, which could put pressure on customer service to field complaints, and the site reliability team to fix it. In the worst case, it could result in customer loss and an injured reputation.

If the application-monitoring system can act as an early warning system, it could help prevent the site or application from going down in the first place, and when it does go down, help track the root cause to get it up and running more quickly.

The challenge here for Cisco is incorporating Epsagon into the existing components of the application-monitoring portfolio and delivering that unified monitoring experience without making it feel like a Frankenstein’s monster of a solution globbed together from the various pieces.

Epsagon launched in 2018 and has raised $30 million. According to a report in the Israeli publication, Calcalist, the company was on the verge of a big Series B round with a valuation in the range of $200 million when it accepted this offer. It certainly seems to have given its early investors a good return. The deal is expected to close later this year.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here. I also tweet.

It’s a surreal day to talk about technology, but here we are. If you can pull your eyes away from the greater geopolitical tragedy that is our world today, here’s what we talked about:

T-Mobile may have suffered a material breach. If this bears out, it could be a leading tech story for the week. Vice has confirmed that at least some of the data in the leak appears genuine.Indian travel service ixigo is going public. The company’s IPO follows Zomato’s own domestic debut.And speaking of IPOs, the Tencent Music offering in Hong Kong could be on hold until next year.And a trio of American tech companies raised a raft of capital as last week concluded. Carta put together $500 million in a huge deal, as Chime raised $750 million. And as the week closed, Discord was reported to be hunting up a new round at a $15 billion price tag.

And stocks are set to open lower this morning. That’s the morning report. Equity is back on Wednesday.

Pepperdata CEO Ash Munshi says lack of appreciation for data management will lead to disappointing results for enterprise AI.Read More

Headlines warn about attempts to exploit gaps in key pharma supply chain cybersecurity. Here's how CISOs can respond. Read More

The report concluded that while respondents have confidence in their plans, teams, and products, they still regularly suffer data breaches.Read More

Unity Technologies is supporting the Lual Mayen Foundation's tech center to teach skills to refugees in Uganda.Read More

The metaverse won’t exist in a closed-garden VR space. It will emerge in various business models, content types, and classes of experiences.Read More

The unfortunate reality is that businesses rarely find citizen development to be the right model for their organizations.Read More

The key to getting more value from industrial internet of things (IIoT) and IoT platforms is getting AI and ML workloads right.Read More

Insurance companies are implementing applications of data science to detect fraud and provide a personalized customer experience.Read More

For enterprise IT teams, managing a cloud-based OS is far easier than managing installed OS and app combinations.Read More

Immutable has established an alliance with NRG Esports to create NFTs for the upcoming Guild of the Guardian's mobile role-playing game. Read More

This week Danny and Alex and Chris took to Twitter Spaces to chat about the current state of the crypto economy, and hang out with friends in a live Twitter Space. We’re doing more of these, so make sure that you are following the show on Twitter.

As a small programming note, I forgot to tell the folks who chimed in during the chat that we were recording it, so we had to cut most the Q&A portion of the show. We got Ezra’s permission, thankfully. The mixup was a bummer as we learned a lot. In the future, we’ll not make that mistake and keep all the voices.

So, what did we talk about? The following:

The current state of crypto regulation in America, and how the government may screw everything up. In short, tech moves fast, and government moves slow. This creates friction.Coinbase kicked the ever-loving shit out of its Q2 earnings. But as it turns out the future for trading-powered companies could include a few quarters of slower results.And everyone wants to fund the next Coinbase. You can understand why. The company is printing cash lately, helping drive more investment into localized exchanges in different markets.

Ok, we’re back Monday with your regularly scheduled programming!

Although older adults are one of the fastest-growing demographics, they’re quite underserved when it comes to consumer tech.

The global population of people older than 65 will reach 1.5 billion by 2050, and members of this cohort — who are leading longer, active lives — have plenty of money to spend.

Still, most startups persist in releasing products aimed at serving younger users, says Lawrence Kosick, co-founder of GetSetUp, an edtech company that targets 50+ learners.

“If you can provide a valuable, scalable service for the older adult market, there’s a lot of opportunity to drive growth through partnerships,” he notes.

Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.

On Thursday, August 19, Managing Editor Danny Crichton will interview Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, author of “Choose Possibility,” on Twitter Spaces at 2 p.m. PDT/5 p.m. EDT/9 p.m. UTC.

Singh Cassidy, founder of premium talent marketplace theBoardlist, will discuss making the leap into entrepreneurship after leaving Google, her time as CEO-in-Residence at venture capital firm Accel Partners and the framework she’s developed for taking career risks.

They’ll take questions from the audience, so please add a reminder to your calendar to join the conversation.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week! Have a great weekend.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Dear Sophie: Can I hire an engineer whose green card is being sponsored by another company?

Dear Sophie,

I want to extend an offer to an engineer who has been working in the U.S. on an H-1B for almost five years. Her current employer is sponsoring her for an EB-2 green card, and our startup wants to hire her as a senior engineer.

What happens to her green card process? Can we take it over?

— Recruiting in Richmond

3 lies VCs tell ourselves about startup valuations

In a candid guest post, Scott Lenet, president of Touchdown Ventures, writes about the cognitive dissonance currently plaguing venture capital.

Yes, there’s an incredible amount of competition for deals, but there’s also a path to bringing soaring startup valuations back to earth.

For example, early investors have an inherent conflict of interest with later participants and many VCs are thirsty “logo hunters” who just want bragging rights.

At some point, “venture capitalists need to stop engaging in self-delusion about why a valuation that is too high might be OK,” writes Lenet.

‘The tortoise and the hare’ story is playing out right now in VC

Aesop’s fable about the determined tortoise who defeated an arrogant hare has many interpretations, e.g., the value of perseverance, the virtue of taking on bullies, how an outsized ego can undermine natural talent.

In the case of venture capital, the allegory is relevant because a slow, steady and more personal approach generates better outcomes, says Marc Schröder, managing partner of MGV.

“We simply must take the time to get to know founders.”

What’s driving the global surge in retail media spending?

As the pandemic changed consumer behavior and regulations began to reshape digital marketing tools, advertisers are turning to retail media.

Using the reams of data collected at the individual and aggregate level, retail media produce high-margin revenue streams. “And like most things, there is a bad, a good and a much better way of doing things,” advises Cynthia Luo, head of marketing at e-commerce marketing stack Epsilo.

New York City’s enterprise tech startups could be heading for a superheated exit wave

“We lied when we said that The Exchange was done covering 2021 venture capital performance,” Anna Heim and Alex Wilhelm admit.

Yesterday, they reviewed a detailed report from NYC-based VC group Work-Bench on the city’s enterprise tech startups.

“New York City’s enterprise footprint is now large enough that it must be considered a leading market for the startup varietal,” Anna and Alex conclude, “making its results a bellwether to some degree.”

“And if New York City is laying the groundwork for a huge wave of unicorn exits in the coming four to eight quarters, we should expect to see something similar in other enterprise markets around the world.”

Disaster recovery can be an effective way to ease into the cloud

Given the rapid pace of digital transformation, nearly every business will eventually migrate some — or most — aspects of their operations to the cloud.

Before making the wholesale shift to digital, companies can start getting comfortable by using disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). Even a partially managed DRaaS can make an organization more resilient and lighten the load for its IT team.

Plus, it’s also a savvy way for tech leaders to get shot-callers inside their companies to get on board the cloud bandwagon.

Regulations can define the best places to build and invest

“The decisions of government, the broader legal system and its combined level of scrutiny toward a particular subject” can affect market timing and the durability of an idea, Noorjit Sidhu, an early-stage investor at Plug & Play Ventures, writes in a guest column.

There are three areas currently facing regulatory scrutiny that have the potential to “provide outsized returns,” Sidhu writes: taxes, telemedicine and climate.

VCs unfazed by Chinese regulatory shakeups (so far)

“China’s technology scene has been in the news for all the wrong reasons in recent months,” Anna Heim and Alex Wilhelm write about the Chinese government’s crackdown on a host of technology companies.

“The result of the government fusillade against some of the best-known companies in China was falling share prices,” they write.

But has it affected the venture capital market? SoftBank this week said it would pause investments in China, but the numbers through Q2 indicate China is steadier than Alex and Anna expected.

Perform a quality of earnings analysis to make the most of M&A

If you’re a startup founder, odds are, at some point, you’ll raise a Series A (and B and C and D, hopefully), perform a strategic acquisition, and maybe even sell your company.

When those things occur, you’ll need to know how to do a quality of earnings (QofE) to maximize value, Pierre-Alexandre Heurtebize, investment and M&A director at HoriZen Capital, writes in a guest column.

He walks through a framework for thinking and organizing a QofE for “every M&A and private equity transition you may be part of.”

VCs are betting big on Kubernetes: Here are 5 reasons why

“What was once solely an internal project at Google has since been open-sourced and has become one of the most talked about technologies in software development and operations,” Ben Ofiri, the co-founder and CEO of the Kubernetes troubleshooting platform Komodor, writes of Kubernetes, which he calls “the new Linux.”

“This technology isn’t going anywhere, so any platform or tooling that helps make it more secure, simple to use and easy to troubleshoot will be well appreciated by the software development community.”

Five years ago, the playbook for launching a new company involved a tried-and-true list of to-dos. Once you built an awesome product with a catchy name, you’d try to get a feature article on TechCrunch, a front-page hit on Hacker News, hunted on ProductHunt and an AMA on Quora.

While all of these today remain impressive milestones, it’s never been harder to corral eyeballs and hit a breakout adoption trajectory.

In this new decade, it is possible to first out-market your competitor, and then raise lots of money, hire the best team and build, rather than the other way around (building first, then marketing).

Outbound marketing tools and company newsletters are useful, but they’re also a slow burn and offer low conversion in the new creator economy. So where does this leave us?

With audiences spread out over so many platforms, reaching cult status requires some level of hacking. Brand-building is no longer a one-hit game, but an exercise in repetition: It may take four or five times for a user to see your startup’s name or logo to recognize, remember or Google it.

Below are some growth tactics that I hope will help jump-start the effort to building an engaged user base.

Laying the groundwork for user-generated content

Before users are evangelists, they are observers. Consider creating a bot to alert you of any product mentions on Twitter, or surface subject-matter discussions on Reddit (“Best tools to manage AWS costs?” or “Which marketplace do you resell your old electronics on?”), which you can then respond to with thoughtful commentary.

Join relevant communities on Discord, infiltrate Slack groups of relevant conferences (including past iterations of a conference  —  chances are those groups are still alive with activity), follow forums on StackOverflow and engage in the discussions on all these channels.

The more often you post, the better your posts convert. The more your handle appears on newsfeeds, the more likely it will be included on widely quoted “listicles.”

Most “user-generated content” in the early innings should be generated by you, from both personal accounts and company accounts.

Build in public …

Building in public is scary given the speed at which ideas can be copied, but competition will always exist, since new ideas are not born in vacuums. Companies like Railway and Replit post to Twitter every time they post a new changelog. Stir brands its feature releases as “drops,” similar to streetwear drops.

Building in public can also lend opportunities for virality, which requires drama, comedy or both. Hey.com’s launch was buoyed by Basecamp’s public fight against Apple over existing App Store take rates.

Mmhmm, the virtual camera app that adds TV-presenter flair to video meetings, launched with a viral video that hit over 1.5 million views. The company continues to release entertaining YouTube demos to showcase new use cases.

Help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups.

Provide a recommendation in this quick survey and we’ll share the results with everybody.

… or build in private

Like an artist teasing an upcoming album, some companies are able to drum up substantial anticipation ahead of exiting stealth mode. When two ex-Apple execs founded Humane, they crafted beautiful social media pages full of sophisticated photography without revealing a single hint of what they set out to build.

Nearly three in 10 employees (29%) would quit their job if they were told they were no longer allowed to work remotely, according to a recent survey. In addition, a recent Harvard Business Study found that “companies that let their workers decide where and when to do their jobs — whether in another city or in the middle of the night — increase employee productivity, reduce turnover and lower organizational costs.”

Over the past 18 months, while instituting a remote work model, our turnover rate at Insightly was the lowest in company history and an internal survey found happiness levels to be twice as high from the previous year. This in the midst of a major pandemic, social movement, forest fires and a disruptive election — all happening at the same time.

On a larger, global scale, employers from companies around the world are coming to the same realization: You don’t need an office to be productive and employees are happier working from home.

The next logical step is, at the same time, a majorly disruptive one and a 180-degree shift toward how companies have operated for over 100 years — the transition from in-person headquarters to a remote, work-from-anywhere model. In line with this shift, we’ve foregone our 40,000-square-foot Soma office space and employees are able to work from anywhere in the United States while keeping the same salary.

There will no doubt be challenges, and there already have been. But with these challenges also arises immense opportunity. Here are a few battle-tested tips on how to maintain productivity while delivering flexibility with this new work model:

Reallocate overhead savings

Let employees choose where they live. Allowing this option will better their lives and make for happy, engaged employees. Overhead costs, especially in large cities such as San Francisco, are the largest operating expense for most companies. Take this large sum of money and invest in employee happiness. You don’t need thousands of square feet in office space to be successful.

That massive overhead cost you just got rid of? Use this toward more meaningful employee experiences that will enhance their lives.

Kiddom, a platform that offers a digital curriculum that fits the core standards required by states, announced today that it has raised a $35 million Series C round led by Altos Ventures, with participation from Owl Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Outcomes Collective. The financing came nearly three years after Kiddom’s Series B, a $15 million round led by Owl.

The startup didn’t just raise money, it finally learned how to make some. Founded in 2012, Kiddom was able to raise millions without revenue or a clear business model. But Ahsan Rizvi, CEO and co-founder of Kiddom, and Abbas Manjee, chief academic officer and co-founder of Kiddom, think an early focus on adoption instead of monetization was necessary.

“At our Series B, we were definitely not making money,” Manjee said. “But we have a free product that teachers and students use, and the idea was to build an enterprise product on top of it.” It’s a common strategy with bottom up sales. For example, ClassDojo prioritized adoption for years before it finally introduced a paying version of its classroom socialization product.

Kiddom poured most of its capital into research and development into its enterprise product. It has two parts. First, it offers a platform that helps schools integrate all of their different platforms into an interface that tracks student utilization and achievement. Second, it offers that platform alongside the product it’s built up for years, a digital curriculum that fits in with Common Core, a set of math and English academic standards that students are required to learn on a grade by grade level. The latter is perhaps the hardest sell for Kiddom, but also the most lucrative.

Manjee explained vendor approval processes across the States can take a long time, and the stakes are high since decision-makers will only turn to a handful of vendors when it comes to meeting core standards.

A lot of Kiddom’s success depends on if traditional curriculum providers, like the Pearsons and McGraw-Hills of the world, don’t catch up to the digitization of education. Rizvi explained that older companies are “losing market share rapidly” right now. Last year, McGraw-Hill and Cengage terminated a proposed merger that would’ve added some fresh competition to the curriculum world.

The product has resonated with some users. While Kiddom declined to give specifics, it said that new ARR growth grew 2,525% its first year. In 2020 to 2021, ARR growth is on track to be 300%. It said that at least one teacher uses its product in 70% of schools in the United States, a metric that has remained consistent since 2018.

Kiddom’s fresh funding and revenue shows that its years of product development have kept it competitive in the eyes of investors, synergistic unicorns and the stingiest enterprise customer of them all, school districts.

Automation will displace 85 million jobs while simultaneously creating 97 million new jobs by 2025, according to the World Economic Forum. Although that sounds like good news, the hard reality is that millions of people will have to retrain in the jobs of the future.

A number of startups are addressing these problems of employee skills, and are looking at talent development, neuroscience-based assessments and prediction technologies for staffing. These include Pymetrics (raised $56.6 million), Eightfold (raised $396.8 million) and EmPath (raised $1 million). But this sector is by no means done yet.

Retrain.ai bills itself as a “Talent Intelligence Platform”, and it’s now closed an additional $7 million from its current investors Square Peg, Hetz Ventures, TechAviv, .406 Ventures and Schusterman Family Investments. It’s also now added Splunk Ventures as a strategic investor. The new round of funding takes its total raised to $20 million.

Retrain.ai says it uses AI and machine learning to help governments and organizations retrain and upskill talent for jobs of the future, enable diversity initiatives, and help employees and jobseekers manage their careers.

Dr. Shay David, co-founder and CEO of retrain.ai said: “We are thrilled to have Splunk Ventures join us on this exciting journey as we use the power of data to solve the widening skills gap in the global labor markets.”

The company says it helps companies tackle future workforce strategies by “analyzing millions of data sources to understand the demand and supply of skill sets.”

The new funding will be used for U.S. expansion, hiring talent and product development.

The dollars keep flowing into Latin America.

Today, Argentine personal finance management app Ualá announced it has raised $350 million in a Series D round at a post-money valuation of $2.45 billion.

SoftBank Latin America Fund and affiliates of China-based Tencent co-led the round, which included participation from a slew of existing backers, including funds managed by Soros Fund Management LLC, funds managed by affiliates of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Ribbit Capital, Greyhound Capital, Monashees and Endeavor Catalyst. New funds, such as D1 Capital Partners and 166 2nd, also put money in the round in addition to angel investors such as Jacqueline Reses and Isaac Lee.

The round is believed to be the largest private raise ever by an Argentinian company and brings Ualá’s total raised to $544 million since its 2017 inception.

Founder and CEO Pierpaolo Barbieri, a Buenos Aires native and Harvard University graduate, has said his ambition was to create a platform that would bring all financial services into one app linked to one card.

Today, Ualá says it has developed “a complete financial ecosystem,” including universal accounts, a global Mastercard card, bill payment options, investment products, personal loans, installments (BNPL) and insurance. It has also launched merchant acquiring, Ualá Bis, a solution for entrepreneurs and merchants that allows selling through a payment link or mobile point-of-sales (mPOS). 

The startup has issued more than 3.5 million cards in its home country and in Mexico, where it launched operations last year. The company claims that more than 22% of 18 to 25-year-olds in Argentina have a Ualá card. At the time of its Series C raise in November 2019, it had issued 1.3 million cards.

Over 1 million users invest in the mutual fund available on the Ualá app, which the company claims is the second largest mutual fund in Argentina in number of participants. The company, which has aimed to provide more financial transparency and inclusion in the region, says that 65% of its users had no credit history prior to downloading the app.

Ualá plans to use its new capital to continue expanding within Latin America, develop new business verticals and do some hiring, with the plan of having 1,500 employees by year’s end. It currently has more than 1,000 employees.

“We are most impressed by Ualá’s ambition and execution. Our investment will propel the next stage of their vision, furthering a regional ecosystem that can make financial services more accessible and transparent across LatAm,” said Marcelo Claure, CEO of SoftBank Group International and COO of SoftBank Group, in a written statement.