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Cuvva raises £15M Series A to launch flexible monthly car insurance

Published December 3, 2019

Cuvva, the app-based insurance provider that began life offering pay-as-you-go driving cover but has since expanded to also sell travel insurance, has raised £15 million in Series A funding.

Backing comes from RTP Global, Breega and Digital Horizon, joining existing investors LocalGlobe, Techstars Ventures, Tekton and Seedcamp. A number of angels also joined the round, including Dominic Burke, the CEO of Jardine Lloyd Thompson, and Faisal Galaria, the former chief strategy and investments officer of GoCompare.

Launched in 2016 when founder Freddy Macnamara (pictured) become frustrated he couldn’t let others drive his car intermittently because of lack of insurance cover, Cuvva was an early pioneer of pay-as-you-go car insurance.

The idea, which was easier explained than done, was to make it possible to insure a car only when it was being driven, and therefore be cheaper for low-mileage drivers, and, via an app and access to the DVLA database, make it easier to on-board new drivers for pay-as-you-drive cover.

The insurtech still offers hourly car insurance, but its product line has since been expanded to daily covery, as well as a product specifically aimed at learner drivers. In addition, Cuvva entered the travel insurance space, no doubt spotting overlap with its presumably younger, millennial demographic.

To that end, Cuvva says it will use the new capital to launch a new pay-monthly motor product in early 2020 that it says could cut average annual bills for car owners “significantly.” It will do this by cutting out various middle people, including brokers and comparison websites, which it says charge insurers about £70 on each policy sold.

“Unlike legacy insurers, Cuvva will not charge a fee to spread payments over the year and it will not penalise loyal customers with dual pricing,” says the startup. Cuvva also says it will offer the same savings, whether you are signing up as a new customer or are a returning customer, and won’t charge admin fees to alter personal details registered with your policy.

Cue canned statement from Macnamara: “I started Cuvva when I couldn’t find flexible insurance to help me share my car. Four years on from launch we are still discovering how big the problem we are solving really is. We’re now selling 3% of all UK motor insurance policies but we’ve got so much further to go. Cuvva is going to be the place where you buy all your insurance, all through our mobile app.”

Penta, the German business banking challenger, partners with SumUp to target offline businesses

Published December 3, 2019

Penta, the Berlin-based business banking challenger that also now operates in Italy, has partnered with BBVA-backed card reader company SumUp in a bid to attract more offline businesses.

Up until recently, Penta had been targeting digital businesses, such as startups and e-commerce SMEs, but has since re-positioned itself for wider business banking appeal.

By partnering with a POS provider offering easy card reader-enabled payments, the German challenger bank wants to extend that offline (such as restaurants, craftsman, healthcare and architects).

Specifically, Penta says businesses can order a SumUp Card Reader via Penta, and in doing so will save money on the initial SumUp setup fee and be able to seamlessly integrate SumUp-powered payments with their Penta account.

They’ll also get access to the existing Penta features, such as being able to open a business banking account entirely digitally, issue multiple payment cards, grant limits and permissions per card for staff, facilitate expense management and integrate with popular accounting tools.

In the future, the SumUp integration is planned to go deeper. This will include the ability to use SumUp payments data to forecast future sales and feed into a business’s credit worthiness when they seek a loan.

“One request that we’ve had since day one has been for our customers to easily and quickly accept card payments, so we are very proud to be able to offer this with our newest partner SumUp,” says Penta CEO Marko Wenthin in a statement.

Adds James Henry, head of Sales and Partnerships at SumUp: “By cooperating with Penta, we will enable even more small and medium-sized companies to digitize their business and make the payment experience as convenient as possible for their customers. Penta, with its growing customer base of companies, is the ideal partner for us to reach the broad mid-market.”

Why Notion is staying small as its valuation gets bigger

Published December 2, 2019

Work tools startup Notion, which recently reached a reported $800 million valuation, isn’t on the verge of a big SoftBank round. In fact, COO Akshay Kothari says the startup has “never felt like if we had more money we could grow faster.”

The company, centered around an app that helps non-developers build collaboration tools, has more than one million users and has scaled its product quickly despite having a team of just 27.

I wrote about the company’s partnership with some of tech’s top accelerators and venture capital firms last month. People are very curious about this small company and how it is run, so here’s more from my recent interview with COO Akshay Kothari in which we discussed the hyped startup’s philosophy of staying small and some of the challenges it may have ahead with this brand of thinking as competitors are raising massive sums.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Notion COO Akshay Kothari (Photo: Notion)

Where does your story begin with Notion? Give me a snapshot of where the team is now.

Akshay Kothari: [Notion co-founders Ivan Zhao and Simon Last] started Notion six years ago and that’s when I invested. I had sold my previous company and I had this newfound money that I didn’t know what to do with. I invested in Notion, so that’s my connection.

We were kind of in research mode for many years trying to uncover what the market needs were. We launched about two years ago; 1.0 was just notes that you could take and a wiki so that you could collaborate with people. And then last year we launched databases and that was the 2.0 version, which kind of seemed like an inflection point, where now you could not only have your notes and your wiki, but also manage your tasks, manage your projects, manage candidates and recruiting, all in a single tool.

Over the last year and a half, the company has grown extremely fast. I joined about a year ago, there were about 10 people at the beginning of this year and now we’re close to 30. It’s still a really small engineering team. We’re 9 engineers, we don’t have any product managers, and we’re 2 designers. So there are about 10 people that are building the product, and 10 people on community and support teams, something that we’ve invested very heavily in. We’re starting to have a sales and marketing team. We have 2 people in marketing and 2 people in sales. That all rounds up to about 27 which is where we are now.

Since you joined do you think the idea has shifted at all?

In terms of the original idea, we were thinking about how people who didn’t know how to code could build things like tools and software that were really useful. I guess the only realization has been that not everyone wakes up wanting to build software, but everyone wakes to solve problems. That was the pivot to focusing on notes, wikis and tasks, because that’s actually something that every team needs.

Are those needs universal for big and small teams?

For the first 100 people you can actually do a lot with Notion. With 30 people, we pretty much run the entire company, except for using Slack for internal communication and Intercom for external communication like talking to customers. Everything else is actually on Notion, like our application tracking system for recruiting inside Notion, our sales CRM is in Notion, our wiki obviously is, our project management as well — no, we don’t use Jira.

For sub-100 businesses, you actually don’t need another tool. When you get to hundreds of people what tends to happens is that some person or some team tends to have a preference for a specific tool. In those situations, Notion plays well with other tools. You can embed things easily. So let’s say Excel or Google Sheets is something that you want to use, you can just embed that inside Notion. So Notion becomes this kind of central nervous system for all of the work that people are doing.

Building on that, one of the things we haven’t done is we don’t do synchronous communication so we’ve stayed away from that because I feel like people like using Slack. On Slack, you can’t actually collaborate on a project… Notion has become a place where you can actually do a lot of your work alongside the synchronous communication.

Work collaboration startup Notion cozies up to Silicon Valley’s top accelerators

So, no interest in building a chat or video chat product?

Not in the near term. I think Slack is one of those enterprise tools that people at companies actually like. For a lot of these other tools, we just have to use it, not because we love it but because that that’s what exists.

Notion’s headquarters (Photo: Notion)

What are the barriers for satisfying the customers with 100+ employees?

Atomico partner Tom Wehmeier reviews ‘The State of European Tech’ 2019 report

Published December 2, 2019

Atomico, the European venture capital firm founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, has released its latest annual The State of European Tech report, published in partnership with Slush and Orrick.

As part of the report, the authors surveyed 5,000 members of the ecosystem — including 1,000 founders — as well as pulling in robust data from other sources, such as Dealroom and the London Stock Exchange .

This year, the report reveals that the European tech ecosystem continues to mature and shows no sign of slowing — particularly highlighting the contrast from five years ago when the The State of European Tech report made its debut. Almost every key indicator is up and to the right, except, rather depressingly, diversity.

The data shows, for example, that competition for talent and access to the best founders has increased ferociously. And from a funding perspective, European founders have more choice than ever, especially with U.S. and Asian VC firms investing more and more in the region. Progress with gender diversity stalled, however, such as 92% of funding going to all-male teams.

I caught up with the report’s author Tom Wehmeier, Partner and Head of Insights at Atomico (also sometimes jokingly referred to as the “Mary Meeker of Europe”), where we discuss in more detail some of the key findings and why, it seems, that the rest of the world has finally woken up to Europe’s tech potential.

But first, a few headlines from the report:

European technology companies are on track to raise a record 30$B+ in funding in 2019, up from $25B the year before. (Source: Dealroom)
Despite failing to match the level of venture-backed exits of 2018, there was a record number of 40 $100M-plus deals as of September 2019, a size that many European tech sceptics did not believe was possible. (Source: Dealroom)
A number of multi-billion-dollar non-venture backed companies like Nexi and Trainline made their debut on the public markets.
European tech policymaking remains a mystery to many European founders.
When asked to describe the top priority of the European Commission in terms of tech policy, 40% of founders and startup employees say they don’t feel informed enough to comment. (Source: survey)
Despite this reported lack of awareness on policy issues, all respondents voted EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager as the person who had the most influence on European tech in 2019, good or bad. (Source: survey)
European parliamentarians aren’t talking about fintech and digital health, two sectors which investors poured a combined $12.7bn into last year (Source: Politico and Dealroom)
Europe’s diversity figures are still grim reading.
In 2019, 92% of funding went to all-male teams, a similar level to 2018. (Source: Dealroom)
There is still only one woman CTO in the 119 companies (<1%) based on a sample of executives in CxO positions at 251 European VC-backed tech companies that raised a Series A or B round between 1 October 2018 and 30 September 2019 with more than $10M funding, even though 7.5% of software engineers are women. (Source: Stack Overflow, Craft, Dealroom)
Looking beyond gender diversity, ethnic minorities in tech experienced discrimination at a much high rate than white peers. (Source: survey)
At least 80% of Black/African/Caribbean respondents who reported experiencing discrimination linked it to their ethnicity. (Source: survey)
63% of women VCs reported increased focus on attending events with stronger participation from diverse founders. The corresponding number for men VCs was only 33% of female respondents suggested that their male counterparts are leaving female VCs to fix Europe’s diversity problem. (Source: survey)
European founders aren’t just aiming for commercial success — they are trying to solve some of the world’s largest problems.
One in five European founders states that their company is already measuring its societal and/or environmental impact. (Source: survey)
Only 14% of founders don’t believe it’s relevant for their company. Founders that are women are much more likely to be advanced in their approach to measuring impact. (Source: survey)
Employees are placing a greater emphasis on corporate social responsibility, with 57% citing its importance in the State of European Tech survey. (Source: survey)

Extra Crunch: It is 5 years since Atomico published the first The State of European Tech report, which really attempted to capture a data-driven snapshot of the entire ecosystem. What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen within European tech in the intertwining years or in this year in particular?

Tom Wehmeier: If I think back to when we did the first report, people who believe that Europe could actually be an interesting player in global technology, were largely limited to people who were in the tech industry in Europe itself. If you then fast forward to today, what has clearly happened — and I think 2019 was the year where this really materialized and became part of the narrative — was that belief translating from people on the inside to a bunch of people that were on the outside.

Most obviously has been the strength of interest from from the U.S. and the number of top-tier U.S. funds that are not just increasing their level of investment activity but committing to spending more and more time here on the ground, hiring people, building teams, building a network, and getting to know companies. I think it probably surprises people to know that 19% of all rounds this year will involve at least one U.S. investor in Europe, which is more than double since since the first year we did the report.

I think the other thing, where I come back to this idea that now we have finally convinced a certain group of people about the role that Europe can play, is mainstream institutional investors. I know it is not going to be lost on you, [but] this is going to be another record year for VC fund raising from Europe. And whilst the headline numbers might not be a surprise, I think what should catch people’s attention is that the composition of the LP base here in Europe is now shifting. And finally, there’s an unlocking of institutional investors, [by which] I mean pension funds, funds of funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, who are committing to European VC at levels that are significantly increased and elevated from where they had been in the past. So, if you just take pension funds, we’re going to see close to a billion dollars invested which is up nearly three fold.

It’s a validation of what’s happening around European tech to see that now coming through and I think is ultimately something that helps to build a foundation for the next five years of success. As much as this is a report that’s looking back, it’s also about trying to understand where things go from here.

With regards to the pension funds, do you think that is driven by the general bullishness towards European tech, or do you think it’s more the macro economic reality that maybe other places where they could put their money aren’t very attractive at the moment?

I think it’s really a reflection that there’s a strong level of belief that European venture as an asset class is an attractive investment opportunity. And that is reflected by the numbers. One of the charts that we’ve got in the report is from Cambridge Associates who do the benchmarking for the VC indices… And when you look back over a 1, 3, 5, or even a 10 year horizon, the performance from European VC is demonstrating that this is a place where for anyone building a diversified portfolio, they should have some allocation. I think it’s fundamentally the strength of the investment opportunity. That is the single biggest driver for why you’re seeing this happen.

I think the biggest thing that Europe has been able to prove is that it can take a great idea and turn it into a great company and that company can scale to not just a billion dollar outcome but to a multi-billion dollar outcome and go all the way through into an IPO or into a large scale acquisition. What you’ve seen happen in 2019 is in part A reflection of what happened last year where it was obviously this record year with Spotify, Adyen, Farfetch, Elastic and others that really showed you can go full cycle from start all the way to finish. And that the magnitude of those outcomes can be at a scale that makes them globally relevant.

Are the pension funds shifting their allocation of VC away from other geographies or are they just doing more VC as a whole?

Kredivo’s parent firm FinAccel raises $90M to expand its credit lending platform in Southeast Asia

Published December 2, 2019

Singapore-headquartered FinAccel has secured $90 million in one of the largest funding rounds for a fintech startup in Southeast Asia as it looks to further grow its credit lending app Kredivo and build more financial services.

The financing round, dubbed Series C, for the three-and-a-half-year-old startup was jointly led by Asia Growth Fund — a joint venture between Mirae Asset and Naver — and Square Peg.

Singtel Innov8, TMI (Telkomsel Indonesia), Cathay Innovation, Kejora-InterVest, Mirae Asset Securities, Reinventure and DST Partners participated in the “oversubscribed” financing round, the startup said.

FinAccel said it has raised more than $200 million in debt and equity this year itself. It has raised $140 million in equity to date.

FinAccel operates credit lending app Kredivo in Indonesia, where it has amassed more than a million customers and is growing by a whopping 300% each year, Akshay Garg, chief executive of FinAccel, told TechCrunch in an interview.

The app enables customers to secure credit between $100 and $2,200. If a customer pays it back in full in a month, FinAccel does not charge them any fee. Otherwise, the service levies an interest rate of 2.95%, he explained.

Kredivo’s payments option is also integrated with a number of e-commerce firms, including Lazada and Shoppe, and food delivery startups in Indonesia, so users can quickly access the credit to purchase things and pay the app later.

Credit lending apps are increasingly gaining popularity across the globe, but especially in Southeast Asian markets, where the penetration of credit cards remains low — hence, there are very few people with a traditional credit score. This has created an opportunity for startups to look at other metrics to determine who should get a loan.

FinAccel’s team poses for a picture

Garg said Kredivo looks at a range of data points, including the kind of smartphone model a customer is using, and the apps they have installed on it. “Basically what we’re doing is almost like creating a user profile about the user using a combination of different data signals that come from the existing credit bureaus, the telcos, the e-commerce accounts, the bank accounts and the users themselves,” he said.

“All of that creates a 360-degree overview of the customer that helps us determine the risk factors and decide whether to issue the credit,” he added. As of today, Kredivo is only approving about one-third of the applications it receives.

Jikwang Chung, managing director of Mirae Asset Capital, the strategic investment arm of Mirae Asset, said in a statement that FinAccel is one of the leading companies in Southeast Asia that is able to “combine a strong technology DNA with top-tier risk management and a bold vision of financial inclusion.”

FinAccel, which works with banks to finance the credit to customers, has evaluated more than 3 million applications to date and disbursed nearly 30 million loans. Garg said the startup is now working to develop more financial services, such as low-interest education and healthcare loans.

In the next three to four years, it aims to grow to 10 million users and expand to other Southeast Asian markets such as the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.

A handful of other startups also operate in this space in Indonesia. C88, which also offers credit to customers, last year raised $28 million in a financing round led by Experian.

CircleCI launches improved AWS support

Published December 2, 2019

For about a year now, continuous integration and delivery service CircleCI has offered Orbs, a way to easily reuse commands and integrations with third-party services. Unsurprisingly, some of the most popular Orbs focus on AWS, as that’s where most of the company’s developers are either testing their code or deploying it. Today, right in time for AWS’s annual re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas, the company announced that it has now added Orb support for the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM), which makes setting up automated CI/CD platforms for testing and deploying to AWS Lambda significantly easier.

In total, the company says, more than 11,000 organizations started using Orbs since it launched a year ago. Among the AWS-centric Orbs are those for building and updating images for the Amazon Elastic Container Services and the Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), for example, as well as AWS CodeDeploy support, an Orb for installing and configuring the AWS command line interface, an Orb for working with the S3 storage service and more.

“We’re just seeing a momentum of more and more companies being ready to adopt [managed services like Lambda, ECS and EKS], so this became really the ideal time to do most of the work with the product team at AWS that manages their serverless ecosystem and to add in this capability to leverage that serverless application model and really have this out of the box CI/CD flow ready for users who wanted to start adding these into to Lambda,” CircleCI VP of business development Tom Trahan told me. “I think when Lambda was in its earlier days, a lot of people would use it and they would use it and not necessarily follow the same software patterns and delivery flow that they might have with their traditional software. As they put more and more into Lambda and are really putting a lot more what I would call ‘production quality code’ out there to leverage. They realize they do want to have that same software delivery capability and discipline for Lambda as well.”

Trahan stressed that he’s still talking about early adopters and companies that started out as cloud-native companies, but these days, this group includes a lot of traditional companies, as well, that are now rapidly going through their own digital transformations.

New Amazon tool simplifies delivery of containerized machine learning models

Published December 2, 2019

As part of the flurry of announcements coming this week out of AWS re:Invent, Amazon announced the release of Amazon SageMaker Operators for Kubernetes, a way for data scientists and developers to simplify training, tuning and deploying containerized machine learning models.

Packaging machine learning models in containers can help put them to work inside organizations faster, but getting there often requires a lot of extra management to make it all work. Amazon SageMaker Operators for Kubernetes is supposed to make it easier to run and manage those containers, the underlying infrastructure needed to run the models and the workflows associated with all of it.

“While Kubernetes gives customers control and portability, running ML workloads on a Kubernetes cluster brings unique challenges. For example, the underlying infrastructure requires additional management such as optimizing for utilization, cost and performance; complying with appropriate security and regulatory requirements; and ensuring high availability and reliability,” AWS’ Aditya Bindal wrote in a blog post introducing the new feature.

When you combine that with the workflows associated with delivering a machine learning model inside an organization at scale, it becomes part of a much bigger delivery pipeline, one that is challenging to manage across departments and a variety of resource requirements.

This is precisely what Amazon SageMaker Operators for Kubernetes has been designed to help DevOps teams do. “Amazon SageMaker Operators for Kubernetes bridges this gap, and customers are now spared all the heavy lifting of integrating their Amazon SageMaker and Kubernetes workflows. Starting today, customers using Kubernetes can make a simple call to Amazon SageMaker, a modular and fully-managed service that makes it easier to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models at scale,” Bindal wrote.

The promise of Kubernetes is that it can orchestrate the delivery of containers at the right moment, but if you haven’t automated delivery of the underlying infrastructure, you can over (or under) provision and not provide the correct amount of resources required to run the job. That’s where this new tool, combined with SageMaker, can help.

“With workflows in Amazon SageMaker, compute resources are pre-configured and optimized, only provisioned when requested, scaled as needed, and shut down automatically when jobs complete, offering near 100% utilization,” Bindal wrote.

Amazon SageMaker Operators for Kubernetes are available today in select AWS regions.

AWS releases SageMaker to make it easier to build and deploy machine learning models

Fulcrum, which provides freelance placement opportunities for technical projects, raises $1 million

Published December 2, 2019

La Jolla, Calif.-based Fulcrum, a job-placement company for technical projects, has raised $1 million in a seed round of funding, led by local technology investment firm Greatscale Ventures with participation from several private co-investors, the company said.

The company has what it calls a fully compliant service for hiring freelancers onto technical projects that had previously only been the purview of full-time staffers — or work that would have been outsourced to pricey consulting firms.

Fulcrum says that its job-placement platform meets the regulatory requirements in 90 countries and is designed to give businesses the ability to design, manage and execute projects on demand.

The company scrapes all marketplaces that freelancers currently use and onboards them through its own service so that they can work effectively with large corporations.

Diversity-focused VC fund Harlem Capital debuts with $40M

Published December 2, 2019

Harlem Capital has upgraded from angel syndicate to full-fledged venture capital fund, closing its debut effort on an oversubscribed $40.3 million.

The firm was launched by managing partners Henri Pierre-Jacques and Jarrid Tingle in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood in 2015. The pair have since graduated from Harvard Business School and hired two venture partners, Brandon Bryant and John Henry, and two senior associates to help expand their portfolio. The over-arching goal: invest in 1,000 diverse founders over the next 20 years.

“We fundamentally believe we are a venture fund with impact, not an impact fund,” Pierre-Jacques tells TechCrunch. “The way we generate impact is to give women and minority entrepreneurs ownership.”

Capital from Harlem Capital Partners Venture Fund I, an industry-agnostic vehicle that invests in post-revenue businesses across the U.S., will be used to lead, co-lead or participate in $250,000 to $1 million-sized seed or Series A financings. To date, the team has backed 14 companies, including B2B feminine hygiene product Aunt Flow, gig economy marketplace Jobble and pet wellness platform Wagmo. Harlem Capital plans to add another 22 businesses to Fund 1.

You need diversity funds like ourselves to get this market anywhere close to parity. Harlem Capital managing partner Jarrid Tingle

With its first fund close, Harlem Capital becomes one of the largest venture capital funds with a diversity mandate. Despite an increasing amount of punishing data exposing the gender and race gap in venture capital, minority founders continue to rake in just a small percentage of funding each year. According to a RateMyInvestor and Diversity VC report released earlier this year, most VC dollars are invested in companies run by white men with a university degree. Other recent data indicates startups founded exclusively by women raised just 2.2% of overall VC funding in 2018, with numbers on pace to increase only slightly in 2019. Meanwhile, the median amount of funding raised by black female founders, as of 2018, was $0.

The stark contrast in funding for female versus male entrepreneurs or white women versus black women founders is in part a result of a lack of diversity amongst general partners at venture capital funds and amongst the limited partners that choose which venture capital funds to provide capital. While there’s little data available on diversity of LPs, 81% of VC firms didn’t have a single black investor as of 2018.

“There’s no rational reason why this problem exists,” Tingle tells TechCrunch. “It persists because VC funds in general have been closely held and clustered around Silicon Valley. They come from particular schools with particular networks with a small head count that doesn’t turn over frequently. Some firms have strategically added a few partners here and there, but not enough to change the organization. You need diversity funds like ourselves to get this market anywhere close to parity.”

“A lot of investors are frankly missing out on opportunities,” Tingle adds.

Having met through the Management Leadership for Tomorrow Program, a nonprofit organization identifying a new generation of leadership, Tingle and Pierre-Jacques have built a prolific internship program at the firm. With as many as six interns admitted each quarter, the goal is to train future investors of color.

Limited partners in Harlem Capital Partners Fund I include TPG Global, State of Michigan Retirement Systems, the Consumer Technology Association and Dorm Room Fund .

The future of diversity and inclusion in tech

Score Cyber Monday savings on TechCrunch Sessions 2020 passes

Published December 2, 2019

Have we got a Cyber Monday deal for you. TC Sessions: Robotics+AI (March 3) and TC Sessions: Mobility (May 14) are coming back to California in 2020, with early-bird tickets starting at $275 and $250 respectively. But if you buy your pass today, you’ll save an extra 15% on each event. How sweet is that?

Don’t delay, startuppers. Buy your pass to TC Sessions: Robotics+AI and/or TC Sessions: Mobility before this one-day deal expires promptly tonight at 11:59 pm PT.

Oh, and did we mention that all startup exhibitor tables are also 15% off? Tables are good for early-stage startups and come with four (4) tickets and demo area at the conference. Book your table for Mobility here or one for Robotics here.

It doesn’t take artificial intelligence to recognize great opportunity, and you’ll find plenty of it at our day-long exploration of the latest issues, trends, tech and products in robotics+AI and mobility. At each of last year’s events, 1,000+ of each category’s top minds and makers gathered for live interviews, demos and workshops featuring world-renown technologists, founders and investors — not to mention world-class networking.

Past Robotics+AI Speakers:

Marc Raibert, Boston Dynamics
Melonee Wise, Fetch Robotics
Colin Angle, iRobot

Past Mobility Speakers:

Ted Serbinski, Techstars
Nils Wollny, Holoride
Ken Washington, Ford

We’re just getting started on building out the event agenda and we’ll announce plenty more speakers and panelists over the coming months, so keep checking back.

Mark your calendar, join us at UC Berkeley on March 3 for TC Sessions: Robotics or come to San Jose on May 14 for TC Sessions: Mobility and spend an entire day with the best and brightest minds and makers. Don’t miss this Cyber Monday opportunity to save an extra 15% on tickets to TC Sessions: Robotics+AI and/or TC Sessions: Mobility.