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Behold, a smartphone devoid of buttons and ports

Published January 23, 2019

Some call it madness. Others call it the next logical step in smartphone evolution. Meizu calls it, fittingly, the “Zero.” It’s equal parts fascinating and maddening. And while being “totally seamless” with “a truly uninterrupted design” is probably not going to be enough in and of itself to get people to purchase the thing, it’s hard to shake the idea that all handset manufactures are heading in that direction anyway. So good on Meizu for getting there first, I suppose.

So, no Sim card slot, and no charging port — thank goodness for eSIM tech and wireless charging. There’s a fingerprint sensor under the front glass and the physical buttons have been replaced with virtual ones. As for the speaker grilles, those have been replaced by something the company calls “mSound 2.0,” which appears to utilize the screen for sound.

How well that will function versus a more traditional method remains to be seen. Honestly, it sounds like a phone created on a dare, but an impressive feat nonetheless. Other specs include a 5.99-inch AMOLED screen and a Snapdragon 845 processor. The rest of the relevant info, like price and if/when it’s coming to the States, is still very much up in the air.

Mobile World Congress next month seems as good a time as any to announce all of that.

Connecting African software developers with top tech companies nets Andela $100 million

Published January 23, 2019

Andela, the company that connects Africa’s top software developers with technology companies from the U.S. and around the world, has raised $100 million in a new round of funding.

The new financing from Generation Investment Management (the investment fund co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore) puts the valuation of the company at somewhere between $600 million and $700 million, based on data available from PitchBook on the company’s valuation following its previous $40 million funding.

Previous investors from that financing, including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV, Spark Capital and CRE Venture Capital, also participated.

“It’s increasingly clear that the future of work will be distributed, in part due to the severe shortage of engineering talent,” says Jeremy Johnson, co-founder and CEO of Andela. “Given our access to incredible talent across Africa, as well as what we’ve learned from scaling hundreds of engineering teams around the world, Andela is able to provide the talent and the technology to power high-performing teams and help companies adopt the distributed model faster.”

The company now has more than 200 customers paying for access to the roughly 1,100 developers Andela has trained and manages.

Since its founding in 2014, Andela has seen more than 130,000 applicants for those 1,100 slots. After a promising developer is onboarded and goes through a six-month training bootcamp at one of the company’s coding campuses in Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda or Uganda, they’re placed with an Andela customer to work as a remote, full-time employee.

Andela receives anywhere from $50,000 to $120,000 per developer from a company and passes one-third of that directly on to the developer, with the remainder going to support the company’s operations and cover the cost of training and maintaining its facilities in Africa. Coders working with Andela sign a four-year commitment (with a two-year requirement to work at the company), after which they’re able to do whatever they want.

Even after the two-year period is up, Andela boasts a 98 percent retention rate for developers, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s operations.

With the new cash in hand, Andela says it will double in size, hiring another thousand developers, and invest in new product development and its own engineering and data resources. Part of that product development will focus on refining its performance monitoring and management toolkit for overseeing remote workforces.

“We believe Andela is a transformational model to develop software engineers and deploy them at scale into the future enterprise,” says Lilly Wollman, co-head of Growth Equity at Generation Investment Management, in a statement. “The global demand for software engineers far exceeds supply, and that gap is projected to widen. Andela’s leading technology enables firms to effectively build and manage distributed engineering teams.”

DoorDash poaches Uber Eats engineering boss

Published January 23, 2019

One way to gain ground on a competitor is to poach their best executives. We’ve seen it time and time again, from high-level Tesla employees fleeing for Lyft or Apple stealing Google’s AI talent.

DoorDash, a well-funded food delivery unicorn, is familiar with this method of staffing. The company announced this morning that it has poached its second Uber employee in the last year to join its growing business. Ryan Sokol, credited with leading and scaling Uber Eats, Uber’s food delivery arm, from its inception, has joined DoorDash as its vice president of engineering.

The news comes shortly after the San Francisco-based company hired Prabir Adarkar, Uber’s former head of strategic finance, as its chief financial officer. The company also recently hired chief people officer Sarah Wagener from Pandora, where she was VP of human resources.

Reporting to co-founder and chief executive officer Tony Xu, Sokol will lead the product, infrastructure and data science teams within DoorDash’s engineering department.

“Ryan comes to DoorDash at a critical inflection point in our business following a breakout year,” DoorDash wrote in an announcement. “In 2018 we 5xed our geographic footprint from 600 to 3,300 cities and tripled our valuation to more than $4 billion.”

“We doubled the engineering team to 200+ last year, working on a variety of problems from machine learning applications to logistics to personalizing consumer experiences,” DoorDash added. “This year, we plan to double our team again and continue on our trajectory as the fastest growing last-mile logistics company in the space.”

Six-year-old DoorDash has raised nearly $1 billion in venture capital funding, most recently at a $4 billion valuation, from SoftBank, Sequoia, Coatue Management, DST Global, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, CRV and several others.

DoorDash is officially live in all 50 states

Electric, the startup that automates IT, raises $25 million from GGV

Published January 23, 2019

Electric.ai, the New York-based startup that offers chat-based IT support, has announced the close of a $25 million Series B round led by GGV. As part of the deal, partner Jeff Richards will be joining the board.

Founder Ryan Denehy launched Electric in 2016. Previously, he’d run two startups that were sold to USA Today Sports and Groupon, respectively, where he realized that all of the simplicity that came with using a service like Zenefits simply didn’t exist in the IT world.

“It was all local service providers, and they all charge way too much money,” said Denehy. “I thought ‘this is so nuts!’ Companies are using more and more technology every day.”

With his second startup, Swarm, he saw even more clearly how big of a problem this was as the company sold a product that required hardware installation at retailers.

“We were building a company on top of local IT providers, and I saw up close and personal how difficult it was and how fragmented the industry was.”

And so, Electric was born.

The premise is relatively simple. Most of IT’s tasks focus on administration, distribution and maintenance of software programs, meaning that the individual IT specialist doesn’t necessarily need to be desk-side troubleshooting a hardware issue.

Companies using Electric simply install its software on every corporate laptop, giving the top IT employee or the org’s decision-maker a bird’s-eye view of the lay of the land. They can grant and revoke permissions, assign roles and make sure everyone’s software is up to date. By integrating with the APIs of the top office software programs, like Dropbox and G Suite, most of the day-to-day tasks of IT can be handled through Electric’s dashboard.

This leaves IT professionals time to focus on actual troubleshooting, hardware installation, etc.

For startups that haven’t yet hired an IT person, Electric connects startups that need help with installation or in-person troubleshooting with local vendors.

Electric says it has automated around 40 percent of IT tasks, with plans to automate 80 percent of IT tasks over 2019.

The company currently has around 300 customers, which rounds out to about 10,000 total users, and serves 10 U.S. markets, including New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and Austin, among others.

The new funding brings Electric’s total funding amount to $37.3 million.

Sustainable Ocean Alliance nets $1.5 million donation from Benioffs

Published January 23, 2019

Healthy oceans are on the minds of Marc and Lynne Benioff, and they showed it today with a $1.5 million donation to the Sustainable Ocean Alliance (SOA), a new nonprofit attempting to promote and incubate conservation-focused startups. The money will considerably expand the organization’s upcoming Ocean Solutions accelerator.

Benioff appeared Wednesday on a panel at Davos about the “ocean economy,” at which he mentioned the donation and SOA. He joined rather a powerhouse lineup to address the issues of environmental dangers threatening wallets as well as whales: Michelle Bachelet (U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights), Enric Sala (an Explorer-in-Residence at National Geographic), Nina Jensen of REV Ocean and indefatigable environmental crusader Al Gore. I certainly wish I could have attended.

It’s clear that the Salesforce founder is as concerned about environmental issues as he is about social ones, and as ready to write a check when there’s a compelling reason to do so.

Benioff at Disrupt SF in 2016

“Our oceans are in grave danger, due to the many consequences of climate change and pollution,” he said in a press release announcing the donation. “These challenges can be solved with investment and innovation. Lynne and I are proud to support [SOA founder] Daniela Fernandez and the Sustainable Ocean Alliance’s bold vision to create 100 new startups by 2021 to help heal the ocean.”

The SOA started its accelerator last year with a handful of interesting ocean- and conservation-focused startups: a device to keep fish from getting tangled in nets, wave-harvesting energy tech, materials for oil cleanups, that sort of thing. It’s got another batch planned and the Benioff’s donation will allow it to triple the number of startups included. Several will be going to the “Accelerator at Sea,” an eight-day event aboard a Lindblad Expeditions ship sailing from Alaska this summer.

Last year the organization also got a sudden cash infusion from a motivated donor: the mysterious Pine, who distributed some $86 million to charity (and nonprofits like SOA) after making a tremendous amount of money on Bitcoin. These are one-off donations, naturally — so of course financial sustainability, as well as ecological, is on Fernandez’s mind.

Pineapple Fund drops $1M on the Sustainable Ocean Alliance and its new accelerator

“We realize that we cannot simply depend on individual donors or anonymous cryptocurrency gifts. We have had difficulty finding traditional forms of funding for SOA due to the limited amount of funds that are allocated to such a niche sector,” Fernandez, who is at Davos but unfortunately not on the aforementioned panel, told me.

“Instead of only having to fundraise, we have had to create new funders by educating them about the importance of protecting the ocean. It is the typical entrepreneurial scenario of building the plane while flying it. However, in our case, we had to build the plane while simultaneously developing the aircraft market.”

As part of that the nonprofit now plans to release a yearly “State of Our Ocean” report — the first came out today. It’s not so much a scholarly or analytical report like you might have from NOAA or national fisheries or wildlife concerns. Fernandez says this one “takes into account the perspective of young people who are on the ground working to solve the issues at hand. SOA interviewed 3,000 young ocean leaders from around the world who gave their input as to what the ocean priorities should be in 2019 and graded our current world leaders on their efforts to restore the health of the ocean.”

It’s good to ask the un-jaded youngs about things like this, and SOA specifically aims to find and promote young entrepreneurs and activists, so it’s on brand. I’ve read through it and there’s a lot of info about impending disasters, many of which have to do with climate change, but plenty are caused by people as well (or rather, caused by people more recently). It’s a bit depressing, but what isn’t?

Hopefully the cash infusion will help scoop up more of those motivated young folks into the program. We’ll probably hear more from the SOA when it finds some more startups to load into the accelerator.

Desktop Metal just raised another $160 million

Published January 23, 2019

Desktop Metal announced this morning that it has raised $160 million. That Series E brings the Burlington, Mass.-based metal 3D printing company up to a whopping $438 million. The startup’s tagline says the company “is reinventing the way design and manufacturing teams print with metal” — and now it undoubtedly has the money to do so.

Koch Disruptive Technologies (yes, that Koch) led the round, joined by GV, Panasonic and Techtronic Industries. The latest round follows $65 million last March, which found Ford investing in the technology, which has applications for both prototyping and manufacturing. Big names like BMW and Lowe’s have also pumped money into Desktop’s impressive additive manufacturing technology.

The company will be investing the massive funding back into its technology. “This new funding will fuel the continued development of our metal 3D printing technology and rich product roadmap, the scaling of operations to meet a growing demand of orders, and the financing of major new research and development initiatives,” co-founder and CEO Ric Fulop said in a press release tied to the news.

Desktop Metal’s technology clearly represents a bright spot in the world of 3D printing/additive manufacturing — at least so far as investors are concerned. Much of that is due to the speed and durability of the printing process, which is helping it move from simple prototyping to real-world product manufacturing.

Lumigo scores $8M seed to help manage serverless operations

Published January 23, 2019

Lumigo, an Israeli startup, announced a healthy $8 million seed round today, as it emerged from stealth to help companies monitor serverless architecture. Investors include Pitango Venture Capital, Grove Ventures and Meron Capital.

The company was started by a couple of ex-Checkpoint execs, Erez Berkner and Aviad Mor. They decided to head out on their own to solve a problem they were seeing around monitoring as developers moved to serverless environments.

Serverless computing lets developers code applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. That’s because services like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions provide the exact amount of infrastructure resources required to run the application at any given moment. It is incredibly convenient for developers trying to move more quickly, but it poses challenges for the operations team trying to manage and monitor the application.

To help solve this, the company uses a visual map to show operations exactly what’s happening inside the application. The map enables operations teams to see and understand every request and get to the root cause of a problem. It can trace the path not only from the serverless infrastructure, but also to adjacent services like database and storage.

Lumigo serverless monitoring map

For starters, the company is working with AWS, but plans to add support for other cloud platforms down the road. Moving forward, the founders’ vision is more than just serverless. They plan to expand to monitor containers and API services like Twilio and Stripe.

For now, it’s still early days, but the company has eight employees and a dozen customers using the product. The money should allow them to hire more engineers and begin building out the product further.

Adobe acquires Allegorithmic, makers of the Substance texture tools

Published January 23, 2019

Adobe today announced that it has acquired Allegorithmic, the French company behind the Substance tools for creating textures that are widely used by AAA game creators, as well as visual effects artists, animators and designers. Over time, Adobe will bring many of Allegorithmic’s technologies to its various Creative Cloud tools, many of which already offer complementary tools. Beyond those integrations, though, what this acquisition is really about is the fact that 3D design and creating 3D content is becoming increasingly important for the creatives who use Adobe’s tools. With Adobe Dimension and, more recently, Project Aero for creating AR experiences, the company has started focusing on 3D, and this acquisition will bring both talent and technology to the company.

It’s worth noting that Adobe previously invested in Allegorithmic and that Dimension already features integration with Substance, so today’s announcement has clearly been in the works for a while.

As Adobe’s chief product officer Scott Belsky told me, it’s worth remembering that many of Adobe’s most important products today were acquisitions, including Photoshop back in 1990. “Adobe is a company that has always embraced new DNA and has grown through these critical acquisitions,” he said, and noted that Adobe always looks to these acquisitions to see how it can change through them — not how it can change the company it acquires. “For Creative Cloud, this is one of these acquisitions,” he added.

He also noted that while Substance has been around for more than 15 years, there’s a lot of tailwind in the industry now that it’s often easier to render and image than set up a photo or video shoot and then edit and retouch those images. Adobe, of course, wants to catch as much of that tailwind as possible.

Adobe’s Stefano Corazza, who is the company’s head of AR, also noted that the Allegorithmic team was among the first to focus on physics-based rendering and that tools like Substance will become increasingly important as creatives try to build realistic AR experiences that need to be as photorealistic as possible — and to do that, you need to be able to create materials that are able to reflect light properly, for example. He also stressed that new technologies like Nvidia’s RTX raytracing hardware will keep pushing the boundaries on photo realism.

The current Substance product line will remain intact, by the way. Adobe obviously knows that it is acquiring a set of tools that have been used for creating games like Assassin’s Creed, Forza and Call of Duty, but also movies like Blade Runner 2049. Those use cases aren’t going away. But while Adobe obviously has a long history in the movie industry, this is also a move that takes it deeper into the world of game development. Don’t expect to see Adobe launch a competitor to Unity or other game development tools, though. What Belsky seems to be more interested in — besides the existing use cases — is to enable a wider range of people to make objects in games, for example. He noted there’s already a flourishing number of games that allow players to use their own objects and textures, for example, and Adobe wants to offer tools for them, too.

The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition.

Anchorage emerges with $17M from a16z for ‘omnimetric’ crypto security

Published January 23, 2019

I’m not allowed to tell you exactly how Anchorage keeps rich institutions from being robbed of their cryptocurrency, but the off-the-record demo was damn impressive. Judging by the $17 million Series A this security startup raised last year led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by Khosla Ventures, #Angels, Max Levchin, Elad Gil, Mark McCombe of Blackrock and AngelList’s Naval Ravikant, I’m not the only one who thinks so. In fact, crypto funds like Andreessen’s a16z crypto, Paradigm and Electric Capital are already using it.

They’re trusting in the guys who engineered Square’s first encrypted card reader and Docker’s security protocols. “It’s less about us choosing this space and more about this space choosing us. If you look at our backgrounds and you look at the problem, it’s like the universe handed us on a silver platter the Venn diagram of our skill set,” co-founder Diogo Monica tells me.

Today, Anchorage is coming out of stealth and launching its cryptocurrency custody service to the public. Anchorage holds and safeguards crypto assets for institutions like hedge funds and venture firms, and only allows transactions verified by an array of biometrics, behavioral analysis and human reviewers. And because it doesn’t use “buried in the backyard” cold storage, asset holders can actually earn rewards and advantages for participating in coin-holder votes without fear of getting their Bitcoin, Ethereum or other coins stolen.

The result is a crypto custody service that could finally lure big-time commercial banks, endowments, pensions, mutual funds and hedgies into the blockchain world. Whether they seek short-term gains off of crypto volatility or want to HODL long-term while participating in coin governance, Anchorage promises to protect them.

Evolving past “pirate security”

Anchorage’s story starts eight years ago when Monica and his co-founder Nathan McCauley met after joining Square the same week. Monica had been getting a PhD in distributed systems while McCauley designed anti-reverse engineering tech to keep U.S. military data from being extracted from abandoned tanks or jets. After four years of building systems that would eventually move more than $80 billion per year in credit card transactions, they packaged themselves as a “pre-product acqui-hire” Monica tells me, and they were snapped up by Docker.

As their reputation grew from work and conference keynotes, cryptocurrency funds started reaching out for help with custody of their private keys. One had lost a passphrase and the $1 million in currency it was protecting in a display of jaw-dropping ignorance. The pair realized there were no true standards in crypto custody, so they got to work on Anchorage.

“You look at the status quo and it was and still is cold storage. It’s the same technology used by pirates in the 1700s,” Monica explains. “You bury your crypto in a treasure chest and then you make a treasure map of where those gold coins are,” except with USB keys, security deposit boxes and checklists. “We started calling it Pirate Custody.” Anchorage set out to develop something better — a replacement for usernames and passwords or even phone numbers and two-factor authentication that could be misplaced or hijacked.

This led them to Andreessen Horowitz partner and a16z crypto leader Chris Dixon, who’s now on their board. “We’ve been buying crypto assets running back to Bitcoin for years now here at a16z crypto. [Once you’re holding crypto,] it’s hard to do it in a way that’s secure, regulatory compliant, and lets you access it. We felt this pain point directly.”

Andreessen Horowitz partner and Anchorage board member Chris Dixon

It’s at this point in the conversation when Monica and McCauley give me their off-the-record demo. While there are no screenshots to share, the enterprise security suite they’ve built has the polish of a consumer app like Robinhood. What I can say is that Anchorage works with clients to whitelist employees’ devices. It then uses multiple types of biometric signals and behavioral analytics about the person and device trying to log in to verify their identity.

But even once they have access, Anchorage is built around quorum-based approvals. Withdrawals, other transactions and even changing employee permissions requires approval from multiple users inside the client company. They could set up Anchorage so it requires five of seven executives’ approval to pull out assets. And finally, outlier detection algorithms and a human review the transaction to make sure it looks legit. A hacker or rogue employee can’t steal the funds even if they’re logged in because they need consensus of approval.

That kind of assurance means institutional investors can confidently start to invest in crypto assets. That swell of capital could help replace the retreating consumer investors who’ve fled the market this year, leading to massive price drops. The liquidity provided by these asset managers could keep the whole blockchain industry moving. “Institutional investing has had centuries to build up a set of market infrastructure. Custody was something that for other asset classes was solved hundreds of years ago, so it’s just now catching up [for crypto],” says McCauley. “We’re creating a bigger market in and of itself,” Monica adds.

With Anchorage steadfastly handling custody, the risk these co-founders admit worries them lies in the smart contracts that govern the cryptocurrencies themselves. “We need to be extremely wide in our level of support and extremely deep because each blockchain has details of implementation. This is inherently a very difficult problem,” McCauley explains. It doesn’t matter if the coins are safe in Anchorage’s custody if a janky smart contract can botch their transfer.

There are plenty of startups vying to offer crypto custody, ranging from Bitgo and Ledger to well-known names like Coinbase and Gemini. Yet Anchorage offers a rare combination of institutional-since-day-one security rigor with the ability to participate in votes and governance of crypto assets that’s impossible if they’re in cold storage. Down the line, Anchorage hints that it might serve clients recommendations for how to vote to maximize their yield and preserve the sanctity of their coin.

They’ll have crypto investment legend Chris Dixon on their board to guide them. “What you’ll see is in the same way that institutional investors want to buy stock in Facebook and Google and Netflix, they’ll want to buy the equivalent in the world 10 years from now and do that safely,” Dixon tells me. “Anchorage will be that layer for them.”

But why do the Anchorage founders care so much about the problem? McCauley concludes that, “When we look at what’s potentially possible with crypto, there a fundamentally more accessible economy. We view ourselves as a key component of bringing that future forward.”

LG hints at gesture interface for smartphone flagship next month

Published January 23, 2019

LG has put out a gesture-heavy hint ahead of the annual unveiling of new smartphone hardware at the world’s biggest mobile confab, Mobile World Congress, which kicks off in a month’s time.

The brief video teaser for its forthcoming MWC press event in Barcelona, which was shared today via LG’s social media channels, shows a man’s hand swiping to change on-screen content, including the message “goodbye touch.”

The title of LG’s teaser video includes the name “LG Premiere,” which could be the name of the forthcoming flagship — albeit that would be confusingly similar to the mid-tier LG Premier of yore. So, hopefully the company is going to make that last ‘e’ really count.

Beyond some very unsubtle magic wand sound effects to draw extra attention to the contactless gestures, the video offers very little to go on. But we’re pretty sure LG is not about to pivot away from touchscreens entirely.

Rather, we’re betting on some sort of Leap Motion -style gesture control interface being added to the front of the handset, using sensors to detect a hovering hand, for example — probably accompanied by heavy marketing about how filthy-with-germs phone screens are so it’s totally better you don’t actually touch them.

Safe to say, the idea looks terribly gimmicky. Or, well, just terrible. This kind of stuff has been tried (and failed to stick) plenty of times before — as long ago as a decade, in the now no longer mobile-maker Sony Ericcson’s case.

Samsung also added a gesture feature, called Air Gesture, to some of its handsets more than five years old — which lets smartphone users do things like wave to answer a call or swipe through air to scroll up. Some of its smartphones also offer hands-free scrolling via facial tracking.

Yet smartphone users everywhere still seem as hooked as ever on actually fingering their touchscreens. And gesture-based interfaces have, fittingly enough, largely failed to stick.

Although you could view Apple’s Face ID technology as a form of non-touch gesture control, as my TC colleague Ingrid Lunden suggests. Albeit the primary point in that case is security/authentication, so it’s more than just a frictionless way to interact with a device without touching it.

Smartphone makers — and Android OEMs especially — are under acute pressure to stand out in a fiercely competitive and growth-stalled market. So despite a flighty history for gesture interfaces on mobile, a bunch of hardware experiments look to be in play, such as whatever LG’s cooking.

And that includes — as we noted earlier today — what’s now open flirtation with foldable tablet smartphones (see: Xiaomi teased a double folder phone.)

We’ll be on the ground in Barcelona to bring you news of all the major hardware releases next month — including keeping an eye on whatever LG is preparing to unbox (but not actually touch) on February 24. So stay tuned.

We just hope that another detail in LG’s description for the teaser video, in which it asks its followers whether they’re “prepared to get stunned by the LG Premiere,” does not augur a highly potent new form of contactless haptic feedback.