While the world continues to await the arrival of safe, reliable and cost-effective self-driving cars, one of the pioneers in the world of autonomous vehicle software has raised some substantial funding to double down on what it sees as a more immediate opportunity: providing technology to industrial companies to build off-road applications.

Oxbotica, the Oxford, England startup that builds what it calls “universal autonomy” — flexible technology that it says can power the navigation, perception, user interfaces, fleet management and other features needed to run self-driving vehicles in multiple environments, regardless of the hardware being used — has picked up $47 million in a Series B round of funding from an interesting mix of strategic and financial investors.

Led by bp ventures, the investing arm of oil and gas giant bp, the round also includes BGF, safety equipment maker Halma, pension fund HostPlus, IP Group, Tencent, Venture Science and funds advised by Doxa Partners.

Oxbotica said it plans to use the capital to fuel a raft of upcoming deployments — several that will be coming online this year, according to its CEO — for clients in areas like mining, port logistics and more, with its lead investor bp an indication of the size of its customers and the kinds of projects that are in its sights.

The question, CEO Ozgur Tohumcu said in an interview, is “Where is the autonomy needed today? If you go to mines or ports, you can see vehicles in use already,” he said. “We see a huge transformation happening in the industrial domain.”

The funding and focus on industry are interesting turns for Oxbotica. The startup has been around since about 2014, originally as a spinout from Oxford University co-founded by academics Paul Newman and Ingmar Posner — Newman remains at the startup as its CTO, while Posner remains an AI professor at Oxford.

Oxbotica has been associated with a number of high-profile projects — early on, it provided sensor technology for Nasa’s Mars Rover, for example.

Over time, it has streamlined what it does to two main platforms that it calls Selenium and Caesium, covering respectively navigation, mapping, perception, machine learning, data export and related technology; and fleet management.

Newman says that what makes Oxbotica stand out from other autonomous software providers is that its systems are lighter and easier to use.

“Where we are good is in edge compute,” he said. “Our radar-based maps are 10 megabytes to cover a kilometer rather than hundreds of megabytes… Our business plan is to build a horizontal software platform like Microsoft’s.” That may underplay the efficiency of what it’s building, however: Oxbotica also has worked out how to efficiently transfer the enormous data loads associated with autonomous systems, and is working with companies like Cisco to bring these online.

In recent years Oxbotica has been synonymous with some of the more notable on-road self-driving schemes in the U.K. But, as you would expect with autonomous car projects, not everything has panned out as expected.

A self-driving pilot Oxbotica kicked off with London-based car service Addison Lee in 2018 projected that it would have its first cars on the road by 2021. That project was quietly shut down, however, when Addison Lee was sold on by Carlyle last year and the company abandoned costly moonshots. Another effort, the publicly backed Project Endeavour to build autonomous car systems across towns in England, appears to still be in progress.

The turn to industrial customers, Newman said, is coming alongside those more ambitious, larger-scale applications. “Industrial autonomy for off-road refineries, ports and airports happens on the way to on-road autonomy,” he said, with the focus firmly remaining on providing software that can be used with different hardware. “We’ve always had this vision of ‘no atoms, just software,’ ” he said. “There is nothing special about the road. Our point is to be agnostic, to make sure it works on any hardware platform.”

It may claim to have always been interested in hardware- and application-agnostic autonomy, but these days it’s being joined by others that have tried the other route and have decided to follow the Oxbotica strategy instead. They include FiveAI, another hyped autonomous startup out of the U.K. that originally wanted to build its own fleet of self-driving vehicles but instead last year pivoted to providing its software technology on a B2B basis for other hardware makers.

Oxbotica has now raised about $80 million to date, and it’s not disclosing its valuation but is optimistic that the coming year — with deployments and other new partnerships — will bear out that it’s doing just fine in the current market.

“bp ventures are delighted to invest in Oxbotica – we believe its software could accelerate the market for autonomous vehicles,” said Erin Hallock, bp ventures managing partner, in a statement. “Helping to accelerate the global revolution in mobility is at the heart of bp’s strategy to become an integrated energy company focused on delivering solutions for customers.”

Hinge Health, the San Francisco-based company that offers a digital solution to treat chronic musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions — such as back and joint pain — has closed a $310 million in Series D funding, according to sources.

The round is led by Coatue and Tiger Global, and values 2015-founded Hinge at $3 billion post-money, people familiar with the investment tell me. It comes off the back of a 300% increase in revenue in 2020, with investors told to expect revenue to nearly triple again in 2021 based on the company’s booked pipeline.

I also understand that Hinge’s founders — Daniel Perez and Gabriel Mecklenburg — retain voting control of the board. I’ve reached out to CEO Perez for comment and will update this post should I hear back.

Hinge’s existing investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, which backed the company’s $90 million Series C round in February, along with Lead Edge Capital, Insight Partners (which led the Series B), Atomico (which led the Series A), 11.2 Capital, Quadrille Capital and Heuristic Capital.

Originally based in London, Hinge Health primarily sells into U.S. employers and health plans, billing itself as a digital healthcare solution for chronic MSK conditions. The platform combines wearable sensors, an app and health coaching to remotely deliver physical therapy and behavioral health.

The basic premise is that there is plenty of existing research to show how best to treat chronic MSK disorders, but existing healthcare systems aren’t up to the task due to funding pressures and for other systematic reasons. The result is an over tendency to use opioid-based painkillers or surgery, with poor results and often at even greater cost. Hinge wants to reverse this through the use of technology and better data, with a focus on improving treatment adherence.

Meanwhile, Hinge’s jump in valuation is significant. According to sources, the company’s February round produced a valuation of around $420 million, so the new valuation is more than a 6x increase.

Virgin Orbit is wasting no time in 2021 getting back to active flight testing: The company has a window for its next orbital demonstration launch attempt that opens on Sunday, January 10, and that continues throughout the rest of the month. This follows an attempt last year made in May, which ended before the LauncherOne rocket reached orbit — shortly after it detached from the Cosmic Girl carrier aircraft, in fact.

While that mission didn’t go exactly as Virgin Orbit had hoped, it was a significant milestone for the small satellite launch company, and helped gather a significant amount of data about how the vehicle performs in flight. LauncherOne was able to briefly light its rocket booster before safety systems on board automatically shut it down. The company had been looking to fly this second test before the end of last year, but issues including COVID-19 meant that they only got as far as the wet dress rehearsal (essentially a run-through of everything leading up to the flight with the vehicles fully fueled).

This next mission will once again attempt an orbital launch, and this time, the stakes are somewhat higher because actual customer payloads from NASA are on board. They include a number of small satellite science experiments and demonstrations, and while they’re specifically selected for the mission profile (meaning it’s not a tremendous loss if the launch fails), it still would make everyone happiest to actually get them to their target destination.

The nature of the launch window means that Virgin Orbit will likely wait for conditions to be as good as possible before taking off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, so take that January 10 date as the earliest possible launch time, but not necessarily the most likely. If successful, Virgin Orbit will join a select group of private small launch vehicles that have made it to orbit, so the industry will definitely be watching the next time Cosmic Girl takes off with LauncherOne attached.

Procter & Gamble will not acquire women’s beauty products startup Billie, as previously planned, following action taken by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to stop the deal from proceeding. In December, the FTC sued to block P&G’s acquisition of the New York-based startup Billie, a maker of women’s razors and other beauty products, on the grounds that the merger would eliminate competition in the wet shave razor market.

Today, P&G and Billie issued a joint statement, expressing their regret over the FTC’s decision to attempt to block their merger, which led to the deal’s termination:

We were disappointed by the FTC’s decision and maintain there was exciting potential in combining Billie with P&G to better serve more consumers around the world. However, after due consideration, we have mutually agreed that it is in both companies’ best interests not to engage in a prolonged legal challenge, but instead to terminate our agreement and refocus our resources on other business priorities.

Billie had made a name for itself in the women’s razor market by offering to eliminate the so-called “pink tax,” which refers to how women’s products are often marked up at higher price points compared with similar products aimed at men. It later expanded into the broader beauty market with a focus on more natural products that are free of additives and chemicals, including sulfates, parabens, formaldehydes, GMOs, drying alcohols, synthetic dyes, fragrances, cheap foaming agents, unstable silicones and BHT.

The startup was also particularly successful in capturing the interest of a younger, Gen Z to millennial-aged consumer, who responded to its mission as well as its modern, and often even progressive, marketing across social media and the web. In its advertisements, Billie would show women with body hair — a message that went against the grain of traditional societal expectations, where women are often shown in marketing messages — including razor ads — as already hairless and smooth.

Billie’s message was that women should feel free to do what they want about their body hair — but for those who prefer to shave, it would be happy to sell them an affordably priced razor.

What also made Billie interesting was its business model. The company offers to ship replacement blades on a subscription basis to its customers, which helped it grow revenues and customer loyalty.

Ahead of the P&G acquisition, Billie was planning to expand into physical retail stores, which would have made the brand a more direct competitor to P&G products, the FTC had said.

“As its sales grew, Billie was likely to expand into brick-and-mortar stores, posing a serious threat to P&G,” noted Ian Conner, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, in a statement issued last month. “If P&G can snuff out Billie’s rapid competitive growth, consumers will likely face higher prices,” he added.

As a result of the FTC’s actions, the companies chose to put an end to their plans to merge as opposed to pursuing further legal action.

The FTC praised this decision in a release issued today. Reuters also reported on the companies’ decision to terminate.

“Procter & Gamble’s abandonment of the acquisition of Billie is good news for consumers who value low prices, quality, and innovation,” the FTC statement reads. “Billie is a direct-to-consumer company whose advertising targets customers who are tired of paying more for comparable razors. The FTC voted to challenge this merger because it would have eliminated dynamic competition from Billie.”

The FTC lawsuit was the second antitrust suit the agency filed in 2020 after it previously sued to block Edgewell Personal Care’s (maker of Schick razors) $1.37 billion deal to acquire the razor startup Harry’s, Inc., another direct-to-consumer brand. As a result, that deal fell through, too.

Coral reefs all over the world are struggling to survive, with millions of people and billions of dollars in business that rely on them at risk — on top of the fundamental tragedy of losing such a crucial ecosystem. Coral Vita aims to modernize both coral restoration techniques and the economy surrounding them, and has raised a $2 million seed round to kick things off in earnest.

I wrote about Coral Vita late in 2019 when I encountered co-founder Gator Halpern on the Sustainable Ocean Alliance’s Accelerator at Sea. At the time, the operation was both smaller and under siege by Hurricane Dorian, which wiped out the team’s coral farm in the Bahamas — and then, of course, the pandemic arrived just in time to spoil the team’s 2020 plans along with everyone else’s.

But despite the general chaos of the last year, Coral Vita managed to start and at last close a $2 million round, with the intention to come back bigger and better and demonstrate a new global model for the field.

“We decided rather than just rebuilding our pilot farm to that pilot level, we’d just take the next step forward in our journey. We really believe this is an opportunity to jump start a restoration economy,” said Sam Teicher, co-founder and chief reef officer.

To picture how reef restoration looks today, imagine (as Teicher invited me to) an underwater garden near the shore, with floating ropes and structures on which grow coral fragments that are occasionally harvested and transported to the area in need of young, healthy corals.

“But when you think about the scale of the problem — half the world’s reefs are dead and 90 percent of the other half are predicted to die in the next 30 years — relying on underwater facilities alone isn’t possible,” he said.

The plan Coral Vita has is to transition away from ocean-based farms to land facilities that allow for much improved yield and survivability, and employ advanced techniques to speed up coral’s growth and increase its survival rate. One such technique is coral microfragmenting, developed by the restoration community at large, in which corals are broken up into tiny pieces, which can grow as much as 50 times faster in aggregate. And by doing so on land they can exert much more control over the coral’s attributes.

“We’ve got tanks on land with clean sea water pumping through and the ability, among other things, to control conditions,” he explained. “So if you think of what it’ll be like off the coast of Grand Bahama in 40-50 years, we can essentially simulate that to harden the corals against those conditions. Up front, an ocean-based nursery is much cheaper, but when you start thinking about the need to grow millions or billions of corals around the world, land-based facilities start to look a lot more realistic. The cost goes down with scale, too — ocean-based nurseries go to about $30-$40 per coral; we can get it down to $10 as we get up to a hundred or a thousand tanks.”

Not only is the physical scale limited at present, but the income sources are as well: Often it’s government money instead of the inexhaustible well of private cash. Coral Vita hopes to be able to change that by increasing and diversifying supply and income, and going directly to those affected.

As the world starts to open back up, Coral Vita hopes to be able to rely again on eco-tourism, with people coming by the coral farm as they might go to a hatchery or wildlife reserve. That helps balance far-flung income and projects with more local ones (and connects the company to smaller communities like those where it’s based).

While things were still locked down, the company took the opportunity to allow distant support for its local operations, however, by expanding its “adopt a coral” campaign. Anyone who’s contributed to one of these for an endangered animal or ravaged forest will be familiar with how it works, but until earlier this year Coral Vita hadn’t actively pursued the concept.

“We’re trying to transform the space away from grants and aid — we’re selling to customers that depend on the ecosystems of reefs,” Teicher said. “If you’re a hotel that relies on scuba or snorkel tourists, if you’re a coastal property owner or insurer, a government, a development bank, a cruise line, you can hire Coral Vita to restore the reefs that you depend on.”

This superficially mercenary business model where commercially important reefs get priority wouldn’t be necessary, of course, if governments and industry hadn’t systematically neglected these reefs to begin with. Not that privately funded projects are somehow fundamentally tainted, but this type of restoration work tends to be seen as the milieu of nonprofits and government agencies. One might consider this approach a direct, if late, tax that cuts out the government middle man.

The fact is this is globally crucial work that needs to start now, not in five or 10 years when the correct conservation funds are organized by concerned parties. Every month counts when reefs are actively deteriorating, and private money is the only realistic option to scale up fast and do what needs to be done. Plus, as the process becomes cheaper, it becomes easier to fund projects without commercial backing.

“On top of that is the ability to innovate,” added Teicher. “What we’re trying to do with this round is to make advances to the science and engineering, including 3D printing and robotics in the process. We’re launching R&D projects not just for restoration but protection.”

He cited Tom Chi, co-founder of Google X and an early advisor and investor, as someone who has pushed on the automation side, comparing the industry to agriculture, where robotics is currently having a transformative effect.

Proving out the scalable land-based farms opens up the possibility of a global presence, as well — lowering costs and lead times for corals to be brought to where they’re needed.

“We’re at a point where we need to rethink adaptation and how to fund it,” said Teicher. “The two-year plan is to launch more farms in other countries — ultimately we want them in every nation with reefs and for this to be the biggest coral farm that ever existed.”

Of course he, like most, would rather that restoration never had to happen in the first place. If people would stop the practices that kill reefs, it would certainly help — though as with most of these global-scale problems, stopping the behavior doesn’t mean the problem disappears. Coral farming will still be crucial for recovery, just as other mitigations and contributions will be needed to help nature reestablish balance, or at least something approaching balance.

Leading the $2 million round was the environment-focused Builders Collective, with participation from Apollo Projects’ Max Altman and baseball’s Max and Erica Scherzer. Earlier investors (in a pre-seed or “seed one” round) include the Sustainable Ocean Alliance, Tom Chi as mentioned, Adam Draper, Yale University, and Sven and Kristin Lindblad.

Boat, an electronics and lifestyle startup in India, has raised $100 million in a new financing round that many independent investors termed as the most successful hardware startup story to date in the world’s second-largest internet market.

An affiliate of Warburg Pincus, a New York-headquartered private equity firm, financed the entire Series B round for the four-year-old Indian startup, which sells low-cost, durable headphones, earphones and other mobile accessories.

The round gives Boat, which had raised about $3 million in equity and debt financing prior to the new round, a post-money valuation of about $300 million, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Executives of Boat declined to comment on the valuation, other than saying that Warburg Pincus had bought a “significant minority stake” in the startup.

An investor who did not want to be named said Boat has grown to be an anomaly case among hardware startups in India. There aren’t many hardware startups in India in the first place. Among those that do exist, very few have been able to raise much money. (Technically, I suppose you could squint your eyes hard enough to see smartphone vendors Micromax and Lava International as hardware startups, but neither of them have raised $100 million.) Boat has made things even more interesting by achieving an additional rare milestone: profitability, said Sameer Mehta, co-founder of the startup, in an interview with TechCrunch.

The secret sauce of Boat, at least in part, is that it has managed to keep the price points of its accessories low while also making them aesthetically appealing. The startup counts the young generation as its target audience who want good-looking accessories at low prices but also tend to upgrade every few months.

Another possible reason why things worked out for Boat, which had only one institutional investor prior to the new round (Fireside Ventures), is that it showed up at the right time. The startup began its journey with selling charging cables and power adapters. Its beginning coincided with the Indian smartphone market hitting a tipping point, where millions of people had started to buy a handset each month.

A few months into its journey, India’s richest man (Mukesh Ambani) further accelerated the smartphone market with the launch of telecom network Reliance Jio, which offered 4G data at no price for several months, suddenly giving tens of millions of people in the country yet another reason to upgrade to a smartphone.

Boat has expanded into several categories in recent years, and followed the same strategy that made it stand out in the first place. Its fitness wearable starts at Indian rupees 1,799 ($24.50), smartwatches at $34, charging cables at $3.40, home theatre soundbars at $54, wireless speakers at $13.50, headphones at $5.50 and AirPod-like earbuds at $27.

According to marketing research firm IDC, Boat commands over 30% of the wearable market in India and is the fifth-largest brand globally in the category.

The startup — which clocked revenue of more than $95 million in the financial year that ended in March last year and expects to double this by the current financial year — sells its products through both online and offline retail channels. Its devices are available through Flipkart, Amazon India and Reliance Retail, as well as Tata Cliq, Croma and Vijay Sales. Analysts at HDFC bank estimated in a note last month that Boat Lifestyle’s products are available through more than 5,000 retail stores across India, and it plans to enter global markets — something it would have done much sooner if the pandemic hadn’t occurred.

“We see a compelling growth story in boAt and believe the company is well-poised to build upon the strong leadership position it has carved out within the industry and stands to benefit from the secular tailwinds of e-commerce growth in India. Warburg Pincus is excited to partner with the management team of boAt led by Aman & Sameer in this journey and we look forward to supporting them through the next phase of the company’s growth,” said Vishal Mahadevia, managing director and head of Warburg Pincus India, in a statement.

Mehta said Boat has also been lucky with the way it marketed its products. Instead of following the traditional way of advertising, the startup signed up a handful of top young celebrities and cricketers who promoted Boat products. It helped that some of the people it counted on very early on — such as the cricketer Hardik Pandya (pictured in the lead image) — have also grown to be more successful in recent years.

It’s unclear who Boat’s rivals are today. Certainly smartphone vendors such as Xiaomi and Realme that have expanded their accessories businesses pose a threat. Retailers like Croma, Flipkart and Amazon have also expanded their in-house private labels to launch earphones and other mobile accessories in recent years. Mehta suggested that the market in which Boat operates is not a zero-sum game yet. “Everyone is growing at the same time,” he said.

An investor who has backed several D2C brands, but not Boat, in India said that it’s true that many customers of Boat might consider buying Amazon Basics products, but he cautioned that Amazon Basics products are not necessarily the most aspirational items. “People are buying Boat because their products carry a premium feeling,” he said.

Another investor added that Amazon Basics items are also not as aggressively priced in India, as unlike other markets, Amazon is yet to scale its Amazon Basics catalog in the country.

Boat will deploy the fresh capital to shift more of its manufacturing from China to India, and expand to more categories, including gaming keyboards and mice, Mehta said.

The rise of distributed teams in response to the coronavirus has led to more video-conferencing meetings for all of us. As offices remain closed, distributed work is forcing companies to figure out a better way than Zoom or Google Hangouts to meet with employees across time zones and teams.

Rewatch wants to make meetings more efficient, and maybe even shorter. Co-founded by Connor Sears and Scott Goldman, Rewatch creates and organizes private video channels for companies to store meetings so employees can sift through them on their own time.

And at its core, Rewatch is a counterintuitive play: The startup thinks it can combat “Zoom fatigue” by giving employees more ways to watch video-conferencing calls.

The product works like this: Companies can record their meetings, over Google Hangouts or Zoom, and then Rewatch archives the meetings into a database. Using tags and notes, the videos become more searchable and easier to find. For example, you can tag a co-worker in a meeting in which they got an unexpected shout-out. Or you can search for the last time a manager brought up the project you’re working on.

The video libraries, which the company describes as “mini-YouTube channels,” also include transcriptions of all meetings. Rewatch is turning synchronous meetings into asynchronous bulletins and documents.

“In the past, the only way to scale a meeting was just to have a longer meeting, or more meetings,” Sears said.

If Rewatch works, the founders hope to see meetings shift from squares of muted floating heads to interactive across various teams and time zones with text and annotations.

Sears first had the idea for Rewatch when he was an employee at GitHub, a space for developers. GitHub, which is fully distributed, created an internal YouTube channel to enable employees across time zones to work with one another. Now, the two co-founders are trying to take one of GitHub’s internally loved features and bring it, and more, to the mainstream.

So far, the startup has been able to land a number of customers, including GitHub, although it wouldn’t disclose total numbers. When it launches, the company will charge a subscription fee, but Sears and Goldman have not disclosed the pricing yet.

One of Rewatch’s competitors is Google Drive, which has lagged in creativity around storing and structuring video content. The startup competes with the tool by adding more search-friendly features for video like live transcriptions. Other competitors include Berlin-based Acapela, which is working on asynchronous meetings, and Storyboard, a podcast company that helps directors publish on-demand audio content to their stakeholders. Both companies have recently raised millions of dollars.

While innovation around how meetings are held certainly feels important, Rewatch and others are betting that employees will turn to these content repositories on a semi-often basis and engage with them in a meaningful way. But how many of us watch the standup we missed while on vacation? The business is contingent on that singular consumer habit.

This reality doesn’t mean innovation isn’t welcome. It just means that a huge shift in consumer habits needs to change in order for this startup, and many others, to be successful. And that too-early-to-know reality makes the fact that investors have put millions into the startup even more compelling.

Rewatch has convinced a number investors on its vision. The startup tells TechCrunch that it has raised a $2 million pre-seed round led by Semil Shah at Haystack with participation from Kent Goldman at Upside Partnership. Other investors include Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia, GitHub CTO Jason Warner and SVP of Zendesk Jason Smeale.

More than two years ago, Ludwig Schoenack, Nikolaus Volk and Francesco Wiedemann looked at the bevy of scooter services, ride-hailing apps, public transit and car-sharing options available in most urban centers in the United States and saw a gap in the mobility market.

Consumers who didn’t want to own a car, but needed one for a few days or weeks had two options: head to a car rental center, likely located at an airport or outside the city center, or turn to a car-sharing platform. The three friends — all German immigrants whose paths had crossed in San Francisco — decided to pool their collective expertise from BMW, McKinsey and Uber and launch Kyte to create a new kind of car rental experience without taking on the costly business of owning and maintaining large fleets.

Kyte built a fleet-logistics platform that lets consumers rent vehicles through their app or website. The vehicles, which are located in hubs throughout a city center, are delivered by gig economy workers right to the renters’ home. Kyte also handles the pickup and refuels the vehicle for no extra charge.

“We still believe people own cars because they want it outside their door, so we thought why don’t we put it right there,” Schoenack said in a recent interview.

Kyte partners with car rental firms and other companies that manage fleets, allowing the startup to focus on consumers and the tech.

The startup, which launched in late 2018 and operates in Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco, has caught the attention of capital of investors. The startup said Tuesday it has raised $9 million in funding from DN Capital and Amplo VC. Numerous individual investors from the mobility industry also participated, including former Uber executives Ed Baker, Jörg Heilig, Josh Mohrer and William Barnes, as well as Lime co-founder Toby Sun and Kayak and Travelocity co-founder Terry Jones.

The funds are already being put to work to help drive Kyte’s expansion into markets, starting with Washington, D.C.

Kyte’s founders wouldn’t disclose their revenue, except to say it’s generating a “solid six-figure” amount of revenue monthly. Schoenack added that Kyte’s monthly revenue has grown 400% since March as more consumers have turned to cars during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Even before COVID was on the horizon, it was clear that we needed to change the way we interact with cars,” Schoenack said. Consumers have been more willing to try alternatives like Kyte to travel as COVID-19 has turned many off from air travel.

Despite this fast growth, Schoenack said more than half of Kyte’s bookings come from recurring users.

Kyte has also found its clients — which Schoenack would only describe as the biggest rental car companies in the country — are willing and enthusiastic participants since it helps get vehicles in the hands of customers. Rental car companies were hit hard by COVID-19 since the bulk of operations are at airports. These companies were left with millions of dollars of depreciating assets that weren’t generating any revenue.

DN Capital’s co-founder and managing director Steve Schlenker believes that Kyte will be a core building block to the future of mobility.

“The pandemic has accelerated the transformation of cities and consumer behavior with respect to transportation,” Schlenker said. “Kyte’s unique operations layer facilitates this transformation while providing a level of service and convenience that other solutions fail to meet.”

Today Divvy, a Utah-based startup that focuses on corporate spend management, announced that it has closed a $165 million round at a $1.6 billion valuation. The company said that the new capital was raised from Hanaco, Schonfeld, PayPal Ventures and Whale Rock, along with a cadre of prior investors.

The new investment is not Divvy’s first megaround of private capital. The well-known startup raised $200 million in April of 2019. TechCrunch reported at the time that that round valued Divvy at around $700 million, making today’s deal a more than 2x increase in valuation for the company.

Divvy exists amongst the current generation of Utah-based tech upstarts that are keeping the state’s tech scene in the broader startup conversation. Podium fits in the same cohort, for example, while Qualtrics feels like it’s from the preceding peer group.

Divvy’s market, the corporate spend management space — broadly, corporate cards and software that helps firms manage and limit expenses — is incredibly active today as businesses look to modernize their financial infrastructure. The new capital for Divvy comes after multiple other competitors recently announced fresh funds itself, for example. Let’s take a look at who Divvy is taking on with its new round.

Competition

A few weeks back Ramp, another corporate-cards-and-software startup, announced a $30 million raise and that it had reached $100 million in spend through its service in its first 18 months of business. At the same time Divvy shared with TechCrunch that it had seen 120% customer growth and over 100% growth in platform spend in 2020, compared to 2019. At the time, Brex, which also competes in the corporate spend space, declined to share metrics.

That Divvy was able to raise so much capital given its recent growth rates is not surprising. But that so many companies in its sector are managing similarly strong-to-line expansion stands out. After covering the Ramp round in December and noting Divvy’s metrics at the same time, both Airbase (more here) and Teampay (more here) reached out with numbers of their own.

Teampay reiterated its October-era metrics: that it has seen its annual recurring revenue (ARR) grow by 320% and its total spend grow by 800% since its then year-ago Series A. Airbase noted what it described as 250% growth in ARR — up by 2.5x, in other words — and 700% growth in payment volume (annualized).

Divvy, Teampay and Airbase are therefore growing like all heck, though in slightly different fashions. Divvy and Ramp offer their corporate spend products and software for free, taking a slice of payment volume through interchange revenues. Teampay and Airbase generate incomes from interchange as well, but also charge for their software. This gives them both spend and software revenues.

Which brings us back to Divvy’s news from today. I normally avoid quoting from releases, but in today’s case a paragraph is worth sharing:

The valuation of $1.6 billion and the addition of key investors validates Divvy’s ambition to modernize financial processes by combining credit, vendor, and spend management into a single platform. With this round of funding, Divvy plans to invest heavily in product development and engineering in order to accelerate their future roadmap.

Divvy is going to invest heavily in product? That makes sense. But to give away its software forever just seems odd. Some of its competitors are charging for theirs! Why not Divvy as well?

We’ll see, but what is clear today is that the capital that has gone into startups in Divvy’s cohort was put into a niche that has shown huge demand. So, expect to hear more from this product area in 2021.

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Pokèmon Go creator Niantic has acquired a small SF gaming startup building a league and tournament organization platform to help gamers create their own communities around popular titles.

Mayhem was in Y Combinator’s winter 2018 batch and went onto raise $5.7 million in funding according to Crunchbase. Other backers include Accel, which led the startup’s Series A in 2018, Afore Capital and NextGen Venture Partners.

The startup’s focus has shifted quite a bit since its initial YC debut, when it announced a service called Visor that would analyze video of esports gameplay and coach users on how they could improve their performance. The company has seemed to shift its focus wholly to community tools to help gamers find matches and organize tournaments for games like Overwatch on its platform.

Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed by Niantic .

The “majority” of Mayhem’s team will be joining Niantic with the startup’s CEO Ivan Zhou landing in the company’s Social Platform Product team while the rest of the team joins Platform Engineering.

In a statement, Niantic asserts that the acquisition “reinforces our commitment to real-world social as the centerpiece of our mission.”

Most of Niantic’s acquisitions of late have focused on augmented reality backend technologies so it’s interesting to see them buying tech that focuses on community organization.

Pokèmon Go continues to be Niantic’s cash cow though the company hasn’t seen the same levels of viral success with subsequent releases where organic growth hasn’t been quite as easy to come by. Buying a startup building community tools suggests the company is ready to bring in some outside tech to push their own efforts forward as they strive to create a broader platform for their AR ambitions and more standalone hits of their own.