by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
While taking a long road trip across the U.S. years ago, Sanish Mondkar realized that there were stark, problematic disconnects between employers and the staff they employ.
To critics of late-stage capitalism , that might sound like an obvious observation. But Mondkar, who has a master’s in computer science from Cornell, says that seeing the issues up close made all the difference.
“Traveling from town to town, I couldn’t help but notice the perpetual ‘for hire’ signs plastering the windows of countless labor-intensive businesses such as retailers and restaurants,” he said. “Simultaneously, I saw employees frequently changing jobs, yet struggling to make a living wage. This disparity between employers’ needs and workers’ realities struck a chord with me.”
Inspired by this experience, as well as stints at Ariba as EVP and chief product officer at SAP, Mondkar set out to build a startup that helps companies manage their workforces — particularly contract and gig workforces. His venture, Legion , today announced it raised $50 million in funding led by Riverwood Capital, with participation from Norwest, Stripes, Webb Investment Network and XYZ.
“My objective was to rebuild the enterprise category of workforce management in order to maximize labor efficiency for the businesses and deliver value to the workers simultaneously,” Mondkar said. “I wanted to differentiate the company itself with a focus on intelligent automation of WFM and the employee value proposition.”
Legion is designed to support customers — employers like Cinemark, Dollar General, Five Below and Panda Express — in managing their hourly staff by automating certain decisions, like how much labor to deploy where and when to schedule workers. Taking into account demand forecasting, labor optimization and the preferences of employees, Legion’s platform generates work schedules.
Employees whose companies are on Legion can use its mobile app to request how they want to work and set their preferred hours. Legion’s algorithm then tries to match the preferences of workers with the needs of the business.
Legion also incorporates performance management tools and a rewards program of sorts. Image Credits: Legion
Legion also incorporates performance management tools and a rewards program of sorts. Image Credits: Legion
“We use algorithms trained on a blend of customer data and third-party data, which Legion aggregates from its partners,” Mondkar said. “This integration allows for forecasts for planning and resource allocation.”
In addition to the base scheduling features, Legion — very on trend — is leaning into generative AI with a tool called Copilot (not to be confused with Microsoft Copilot ). Copilot answers questions about work informed by an organization’s employee handbook, labor standards and training content. In the coming months, Copilot will gain the ability to summarize work schedules and fulfill requests to add or delete shifts or change staffer assignments.
“In order to attract and retain staff, companies employing hourly labor must emulate gig-like flexibility,” Mondkar said. “Legion provides this with the intelligent automation of scheduling. Managers can match staff to projected demand, closing the gap between the needs of employees and the needs of the business.”
That’s all well and fine, but two concerning things stand out to me about Legion: its privacy policy and earned wage access (EWA) program.
Legion says it stores customer data for seven years by default — a long time by any measure. More concerningly, the data includes personally identifiable information like workers’ first and last names, email and home addresses, ages, photos and work preferences. Big yikes.
Legion says the data is necessary to “facilitate scheduling in compliance with labor regulations,” and that users can request that their data be deleted at any time. But I question the ease of the deletion process — and just how transparent Legion is about its data retention policies to customers.
My other gripe with Legion is InstantPay, Legion’s EWA program, which lets employees access a portion of their earned wages ahead of their scheduled paydays. Legion charges workers $2.99 for instant earned wage transfers, while next-day transfers are free — that might not sound like very much, but it can add up for a low-income worker. Legion pitches this as a benefit for hourly workers that gives them “greater flexibility” and “control” over their finances, as well as a business retention tool. But EWA programs are under scrutiny from policymakers, consumer rights advocates and employers.
Some consumer groups argue that EWA programs should be classified as loans under the U.S. Truth in Lending Act, which provides protections such as requiring lenders to give advance notice before increasing certain charges. These groups say EWA programs can force users into overdraft while effectively levying interest through fees.
Image Credits: Legion
Image Credits: Legion
In addition, it’s not clear whether EWA programs are a net win for employers. Walmart recently tried to combat attrition by giving hourly staff access to wages early. Instead, it found that employees using EWA tended to quit faster .
Setting aside my niggles with Legion, the company appears to be growing robustly despite competition from companies like Ceridian’s Dayforce, Quinyx and UKG, with revenue and bookings climbing 55% and 125%, respectively, in the past year. That’s all the more impressive considering that funding for HR tech startups fell to a three-year low last year — $3.3 billion, down from $10.5 billion in 2021 — after a flurry of interests from VCs.
Legion, which makes money by charging subscriptions calculated by the number of hourly workers a company employs, plans to put its recently raised capital toward growing its 200-staffer workforce with a focus on expanding R&D and customer-facing teams and launching go-to-market efforts in Europe.
To date, Legion has raised $145 million.
“Legion will use our funds to fuel continued innovations in workforce management, including deep investments in R&D,” Mondkar said. “Legion has been relatively insulated from the broader tech slowdown, thanks to our focus on labor-intensive industries. This strategic alignment positions us well to navigate any potential economic headwinds effectively.”
by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
Starfish Space ’s ambitious first mission to demonstrate on-orbit rendezvous and docking tech has officially come to a close, with the startup managing to complete some of the objectives thanks to a little help from an unexpected partner: space logistics company D-Orbit .
Starfish launched its first spacecraft, called Otter Pup, nearly a year ago with ambitious plans to use it to rendezvous and dock with another satellite on orbit. But the mission ran into trouble only hours after launch, after the satellite Otter Pup hitched a ride to orbit with malfunctioned. Otter Pup was emergency ejected and sent on a dizzying tumble through space.
While the company managed to slow the spin — itself a phenomenal feat of quick thinking and engineering — another issue cropped up a few months later, when the on-board electric propulsion thrusters provided by French startup Exotrail suffered an anomaly and stopped working.
The company had to go back to the drawing board. A docking maneuver was now off the table, but a rendezvous attempt might still be possible. The team started searching for possible partners, Starfish co-founder and CEO Austin Link told TechCrunch in a recent interview.
Starfish Space pulls Otter Pup servicing vehicle back from ‘the brink of death’
That’s no easy task: They had to find an operational spacecraft with no conflicting mission objectives, and that had the requisite delta-V — that is, enough onboard propulsion — to maneuver close enough to Otter Pup.
Starfish ultimately approached Italian space logistics startup D-Orbit, which launches orbital transfer vehicles that deploy and host payloads in space. D-Orbit’s ION satellites are not designed for maneuvering, but the two companies took a closer look at ION’s propellant budget and realized that a rendezvous was feasible.
Orbital rendezvous are complicated: Spacecraft move at seven kilometers per second, and there are other conditions on orbit, like atmospheric drag, that make calculating a vehicle’s trajectory difficult. Starfish and D-Orbit faced additional challenges given that Otter Pup’s thrusters were dead, and the two companies are headquartered, respectively, in Washington state and Italy.
The team brought in the space situational awareness startup Leo Labs to help refine the spacecraft’s orbital estimates and ensure the two companies had the best chance of a successful rendezvous.
The effort paid off: On April 19, after passing Otter Pup at increasingly close orbits, D-Orbit’s ION moved within 1 kilometer of it; Otter Pup then successfully pointed toward the spacecraft and snapped an image with onboard cameras.
Although Otter Pup was unable to attempt docking, Link and Starfish co-founder Trevor Bennett both emphasized that the mission fueled the team with valuable data to inform future missions.
“Beyond validating a core capability, these images [captured by Otter Pup] will provide invaluable data for our ongoing GNC software development,” Bennett said in a statement. “Continuing to operate Otter Pup gave us a lot of value; it allowed us to increase our satellite operations experience, and to test and validate software and hardware on-orbit, including the camera system that was used to capture these images.”
The company has a second Otter Pup heading to space in the first half of 2025. Starfish’s larger plan is to use its satellites to extend the life of large geostationary satellites and to dispose of satellites in lower orbits after they’ve reached the end of their useful life. Beyond these commercial use cases, Starfish’s tech hasn’t escaped the notice of the U.S. Department of Defense, either: Just Monday, the company was quietly awarded a $37 million contract. While the startup can’t give too many details about the exact mission requirements, a DOD notice says the award is “to improve maneuverability on-orbit and enable dynamic space operations docking and maneuvering of Department of Defense assets on-orbit by 2026.”
by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
Wiz , the buzzy startup building an all-in-one cloud security platform, is on an acquisition march to expand its business quickly en route to an IPO.
Now, it has closed a major round of funding of $1 billion to help on that march.
The Series E — co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Thrive — values Wiz at $12 billion, making it one of the most highly valued startups in cybersecurity today.
It’s a notable step up from the last time Wiz raised, in February 2023 , when it closed a $300 million round at $10.3 billion post-money. When rumors of this latest fundraise circulated in the market in March , the amount was pegged at $800 million. The fact that the Series E is now at $1 billion speaks to how heated activity is around Wiz right now. “Iconic” was the word one investor, speaking to TechCrunch, used to describe the company.
(The company confirmed that the Series E also has a small secondary component. Sources close to the deal say it is around $30 million to $40 million, “a few dozens millions of dollars.”)
Assaf Rappaport, Wiz’s co-founder and CEO, said in an interview that Wiz plans to continue growing its platform organically with more talent hires and R&D investment. But with countless cybersecurity startups now in existence, the New York startup sees a prime opportunity to acquire to grow inorganically through acquisitions, bringing customers, talent and technology into the fold more quickly.
“We see two kinds of opportunities in the market right now,” he said. “There are ex-unicorns” — startups that have raised substantial money at valuations exceeding $1 billion, but may have failed to grow as expected and are now exploring other options beyond IPO — “and also exciting, younger startups, superstars with a great trajectory ahead of them. We have an opportunity now to combine forces with both of these.”
The large size of this round gives Wiz a lot of room to make acquisitions in cash, which means giving up less equity in Wiz itself — a nod to the company’s public listing intentions in the future.
The fundraise is coming at a time when Wiz is already rolling up smaller companies. It was only a month ago that it acquired Gem Security — which Rappaport described today as falling into the latter “exciting, younger” category — for $350 million. Just weeks later, Wiz signed a letter of intent to buy Lacework , the startup once valued at $8.3 billion, for just $168 million. (That would make it an “ex-unicorn” in Rappaport’s terminology.) The latter deal went cold, we now understand, during due diligence, a reminder that simply having an interest and the money to buy are not enough to get deals over the line.
The firm has a long list of companies from which to pick. By one estimate there are 62 cybersecurity startups with last-raised valuations of over $1 billion right now. The list includes Aqua and Orca — which are not related to each other but do partner together — as well as Netskope, Snyk, Arctic Wolf, Axonius and many more. The smaller ones number in the hundreds. All these compete against much larger players in the market that include Palo Alto Networks, Crowd Strike and more.
Wiz was founded only four years ago by Rappaport and his co-founders Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica and Roy Reznik (all previously at Microsoft, with startup building experience and exit success in their past). The company claims to have signed contracts with some 40% of the Fortune 100, with some of its biggest customers including BMW, Colgate-Palmolive, strategic investor Salesforce and Mars.
Together that business now amounts to $350 million ARR. That’s still a far cry from the $1 billion ARR it’s aiming to have by the end of 2025. However, that aim is one more reason the company is looking to grow by acquisition.
Wiz’s traction in the market is in part because of the area that it’s targeting, and in part because of its approach.
Enterprises have made significant investments into cloud services to speed up how they work and to make their IT more flexible, but that shift has come with a significantly changed security profile for those organizations: Network and data architectures are more complicated, and attack surfaces are larger, creating opportunities for malicious hackers to find ways to breach those systems.
Wiz has stood out in a crowded market by taking an all-in-one platform approach. Ingesting data from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other cloud environments, Wiz scans applications, data and network processes for security risk factors and provides a range of detailed views to its users to understand where those risks exist, and also how to fix them. Its platform currently covers some 13 areas, from code security, container environment security and supply chain security, and around that it integrates and partners with a number of other startups to build out it ecosystem (and malleability for customers).
Philip Clark, who is leading the investment for Thrive Capital, described AI as part of “the next wave of security problems,” and Wiz has also been expanding its activity there, specifically with AI security posture management.
“It’s meeting customers where their needs are,” Sarah Wang, a general partner at a16z, told TechCrunch. “There is nothing that competes directly with Wiz in the area of cloud security.”
In the meantime, more opportunities abound. When I talked to Rappaport on Monday for this story, he’d just landed in San Francisco to attend the RSA security conference, where there will be nearly 600 companies exhibiting: a ripe opportunity to do some shopping.
The funding — which also saw participation from Greylock and Wellington Management, as well as previous backers Cyberstarts, Greenoaks, Howard Schultz, Index Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Sequoia Capital — brings the total raised by Wiz to $1.9 billion.
That long list of big-name backers, added to the list Rappaport said it rejected, underscores the investor interest in the company at the moment.
“Wiz is nothing short of a rocket ship,” another investor, Arsham Memarzadeh of Lightspeed, said in a statement.
by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
Motional, the autonomous vehicle startup borne out of a $4 billion joint venture between Hyundai and automotive supplier Aptiv, will pause its commercial operations and delay plans to launch a driverless taxi service as it undergoes a restructuring, TechCrunch has learned. The aim is make progress on the core technology and the business model, while preserving capital, according to sources familiar with the changes.
Motional has pushed its plan to launch a commercial driverless robotaxi service with its second-generation AV — the Hyundai Ioniq 5 — to 2026, two years later than planned.
The company told employees Tuesday during an all-hands meeting that the changes will include layoffs, but did not provide a figure of how many people would be affected, according to sources who spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity. Motional began notifying employees if they were laid off shortly after the meeting ended. The company employed more than 1,300 people prior to a 5% cut in workforce in March 2024.
Motional will halt its commercial operations, which today includes taxi rides in autonomous Hyundai Ioniq 5 vehicles in Las Vegas via the Uber and Lyft network. The company will also end deliveries for Uber Eats customers in Santa Monica using its autonomous vehicles. A human safety operator is behind the wheel in all of its commercial operations.
Instead, Motional plans to put greater resources towards building out the core technology. That will mean more testing, which will likely include an expansion to other cities, one source familiar told TechCrunch. Motional tests its technology in Boston, Pittsburgh and Las Vegas. Motional CEO Karl Iagnemma also posted a blog post shortly after the meeting ended that outlines its plans to “to focus resources on the continued development and generalization of our core driverless technology, while de-emphasizing near-term commercial deployments and ancillary activities. ”
“Driverless vehicles will enter the market when the technology has evolved, and — just as importantly — when the business case for autonomous deployment is clear.,” Iagnemma wrote in the blog. “While we’re excited by our pace of technical progress, and our initial commercial deployments have yielded valuable insights, large-scale deployment of AVs remains a goal for the future, not the present.”
Employees were told that the stubbornly high cost of running commercial operations coupled with pricey autonomous vehicle technology components makes the business case challenging today. During the all-hands, Iagnemma told employees that the vision had not changed and that Hyundai’s recent investment into Motional is a sign of the company’s support and belief that they’re on the right track, according to sources who listened to the call.
The restructuring comes less than a week after Hyundai Motor Group invested nearly $1 billion in Motional as part of a broader deal that included buying out a portion of joint venture partner Aptiv. About half of that amount, $475 million, is going directly into Motional’s coffers. The remaining $448 million was used to buy buy 11% of Aptiv’s common equity interest in Motional.
Hyundai’s new investment puts Motional’s valuation at $4.1 billion, according to sources on the call. That’s about the same valuation as Motional had in 2020.
Earlier this year, Motional’s future was put in doubt after Aptiv announced plans to reduce its ownership interest and stop allocating capital to the venture due to the high cost of commercializing a robotaxi business and the long road ahead to profits. Aptiv expects to reduce its common equity interest in Motional from 50% as of March 31 to about 15%, leaving Hyundai with the remaining 85% control.
by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
Apple is refreshing its iPad lineup on Tuesday, which is a bit overdue, as the previous iPad Air was announced more than two years ago . The most important addition to the new iPad Air is that it now comes in two sizes: 11 and 13 inches. This display is still an LED display; if you want an OLED display, you’ll need to buy an iPad Pro .
“For the first time ever, iPad Air comes in two sizes: a redesigned 11-inch Air and the spectacular all-new 13-inch Air,” John Ternus, SVP, Hardware Engineering said.
Ternus also used Tuesday’s event to redefine what the iPad Air means in the overall iPad lineup. It is not as performant as the iPad Pro, but it packs more features than the basic iPad model. For instance, the iPad Air supports the second-generation Apple Pencil (the one that you can magnetically attach to the side of the tablet) and the Magic Keyboard.
“iPad Air is designed to deliver advanced features pioneered on iPad Pro and make them available and even more affordable price,” Ternus said.
Live: Apple iPad Event 2024, everything announced so far
The system on a chip in the device has been updated. The previous version came with Apple’s M1 chip; the company now uses the M2 for the iPad Air. The iPad Air supports Wi-Fi 6E, and customers can optionally get a model with 5G support.
Image Credits: Apple
Image Credits: Apple
The camera has also been moved so that it looks more natural when you hold the iPad in landscape. Both the front and back cameras feature 12MP sensors. For the aluminum body, there are four color options: blue, purple, starlight and space gray.
While the new iPad Air still comes with 128GB for $599 (or $799 for the 13-inch option), Apple is adding more storage options: 256GB, 512GB and 1TB. In other words, if you need a lot of storage, you no longer need to buy an iPad Pro.
The new iPad Air models are available to preorder Tuesday and they will be available next week.
Image Credits: Apple
Image Credits: Apple
by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
As anticipated, Apple’s iPad Pro was the star of Tuesday’s “Let Loose” event. The arrival of the 7th generation device marks the first major upgrade to the premium tablet since 2022.
“We’re not only going to push the limits of iPad,” Apple SVP John Ternus noted during the event, “we’re going to crush them.”
The new device distinguishes itself from the rest of the line – in part – with the addition of the newly announced M4 chip . In fact, it’s the first device to get it, representing a shift for the Apple silicon roadmap, which has favored Macs over iPads.
The new CPU promises “up to 50% faster performance” over the M2 chip in the last model, according to the company. The GPU has been upgraded, as well, including some key game boosting technologies like ray tracing.
Here’s everything Apple just announced at its Let Loose event, including new iPad Pro with M4 chip, iPad Air, Apple Pencil and more
The new neural engine features 16 cores, which the company says is “60x faster” than its first generation NPU.
The new Pro also debuts the long awaited OLED iPad display, further widening the gulf between it and other iPads. It tops out at 1,600 nits of brightness, courtesy of the new “tandem OLED” technology. Apple is refreshing to the new screen as its “Ultra retina XDR.” The new Pro also brings nano texture display tech to the iPad line for the first time.
The tablet arrives in both 11- and 13-inch sizes, weighing 0.98- and 1.28 pounds, respectively. Both models are getting the new OLED display.
The Pro includes a Lidar scanner and a new “Adaptive Flash.” The later recognizes when you’re attempting to scan documents.
Like the new Air, the Pro is shifting the 12-megapixel front facing camera to the side of the device . Naturally, the upgraded Pro is compatible with both the new Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard .
The 11-inch model starts at $999 and the 13-inch at $1,299. Both are up for pre-order today and start shipping next week.
