Qualcomm announces the Snapdragon 855 and its new under-display fingerprint sensor

Published December 4, 2018

This week, Qualcomm is hosting press and analysts on Maui for its annual Snapdragon Summit. Sadly, we’re not there, but a couple of weeks ago, Qualcomm gave us a preview of the news. There’ll be three days of news and the company decided to start with a focus on 5G, as well as a preview of its new Snapdragon 855 mobile platform. In addition, the company announced its new ultrasonic fingerprint solution for sensors that can sit under the display.

It’ll probably still be a while before there’ll be a 5G tower in your neighborhood, but after years of buzz, it’s fair to say that we’re now getting to the point where 5G is becoming real. Indeed, AT&T and Verizon are showing off live 5G networks on Maui this week. Qualcomm described its event as the “coming out party for 5G,” though I’m sure we’ll hear from plenty of other players who will claim the same in the coming months.

In the short term, what’s maybe more interesting is that Qualcomm also announced its new flagship 855 mobile platform today. While the company didn’t release all of the details yet, it stressed that the 855 is “the world’s first commercial mobile platform supporting multi-gigabit 5G.”

The 855 also features a new multi-core AI engine that promises up to 3x better AI performance compared to its previous mobile platform, as well as specialized computer vision silicon for enhanced computational photography (think something akin to Google’s Night Light) and video capture.

The company also briefly noted that the new platform has been optimized for gaming. The product name for this is “Snapdragon Elite Gaming,” but details remain sparse. Qualcomm also continues to bet on AR (or “extended reality” as the company brands it).

The last piece of news is likely the most interesting here. Fingerprint sensors are now standard, even on mid-market phones. With its new 3D Sonic Sensors, Qualcomm promises an enhanced ultrasonic fingerprint solution that can sit under the display. In part, this is a rebranding of Qualcomm’s existing under-display sensor, but there’s some new technology here, too. The promise here is that the scanner will work, even if the display is very dirty or if the user installs a screen protector. Chances are, we’ll see quite a few new flagship phones in the next few months (Mobile World Congress is coming up quickly, after all) that will feature these new fingerprint scanners.

Cove.Tool wants to solve climate change one efficient building at a time

Published December 4, 2018

As the fight against climate change heats up, Cove.Tool is looking to help tackle carbon emissions one building at a time.

The Atlanta-based startup provides an automated big-data platform that helps architects, engineers and contractors identify the most cost-effective ways to make buildings compliant with energy efficiency requirements. After raising an initial round earlier this year, the company completed the final close of a $750,000 seed round. Since the initial announcement of the round earlier this month, Urban Us, the early-stage fund focused on companies transforming city life, has joined the syndicate comprised of Tech Square Labs and Knoll Ventures.

Helping firms navigate a growing suite of energy standards and options

Cove.Tool software allows building designers and managers to plug in a variety of building conditions, energy options, and zoning specifications to get to the most cost-effective method of hitting building energy efficiency requirements (Cove.Tool Press Image / Cove.Tool / https://covetool.com).

In the US, the buildings we live and work in contribute more carbon emissions than any other sector. Governments across the country are now looking to improve energy consumption habits by implementing new building codes that set higher energy efficiency requirements for buildings.

However, figuring out the best ways to meet changing energy standards has become an increasingly difficult task for designers. For one, buildings are subject to differing federal, state and city codes that are all frequently updated and overlaid on one another. Therefore, the specific efficiency requirements for a building can be hard to understand, geographically unique and immensely variable from project to project.

Architects, engineers and contractors also have more options for managing energy consumption than ever before – equipped with tools like connected devices, real-time energy-management software and more-affordable renewable energy resources. And the effectiveness and cost of each resource are also impacted by variables distinct to each project and each location, such as local conditions, resource placement, and factors as specific as the amount of shade a building sees.

With designers and contractors facing countless resource combinations and weightings, Cove.Tool looks to make it easier to identify and implement the most cost-effective and efficient resource bundles that can be used to hit a building’s energy efficiency requirements.

Cove.Tool users begin by specifying a variety of project-specific inputs, which can include a vast amount of extremely granular detail around a building’s use, location, dimensions or otherwise. The software runs the inputs through a set of parametric energy models before spitting out the optimal resource combination under the set parameters.

For example, if a project is located on a site with heavy wind flow in a cold city, the platform might tell you to increase window size and spend on energy efficient wall installations, while reducing spending on HVAC systems. Along with its recommendations, Cove.Tool provides in-depth but fairly easy-to-understand graphical analyses that illustrate various aspects of a building’s energy performance under different scenarios and sensitivities.

Cove.Tool users can input granular project-specifics, such as shading from particular beams and facades, to get precise analyses around a building’s energy performance under different scenarios and sensitivities.

Democratizing building energy modeling

Traditionally, the design process for a building’s energy system can be quite painful for architecture and engineering firms.

An architect would send initial building designs to engineers, who then test out a variety of energy system scenarios over the course a few weeks. By the time the engineers are able to come back with an analysis, the architects have often made significant design changes, which then gets sent back to the engineers, forcing the energy plan to constantly be 1-to-3 months behind the rest of the building. This process can not only lead to less-efficient and more-expensive energy infrastructure, but the hectic back-and-forth can lead to longer project timelines, unexpected construction issues, delays and budget overruns.

Cove.Tool effectively looks to automate the process of “energy modeling.” The energy modeling looks to ease the pains of energy design in the same ways Building Information Modeling (BIM) has transformed architectural design and construction. Just as BIM creates predictive digital simulations that test all the design attributes of a project, energy modeling uses building specs, environmental conditions, and various other parameters to simulate a building’s energy efficiency, costs and footprint.

By using energy modeling, developers can optimize the design of the building’s energy system, adjust plans in real-time, and more effectively manage the construction of a building’s energy infrastructure. However, the expertise needed for energy modeling falls outside the comfort zones of many firms, who often have to outsource the task to expensive consultants.

The frustrations of energy system design and the complexities of energy modeling are ones the Cove.Tool team knows well. Patrick Chopson and Sandeep Ajuha, two of the company’s three co-founders, are former architects that worked as energy modeling consultants when they first began building out the Cove.Tool software.

After seeing their clients’ initial excitement over the ability to quickly analyze millions of combinations and instantly identify the ones that produce cost and energy savings, Patrick and Sandeep teamed up with CTO Daniel Chopson and focused full-time on building out a comprehensive automated solution that would allow firms to run energy modeling analysis without costly consultants, more quickly, and through an interface that would be easy enough for an architectural intern to use.

So far there seems to be serious demand for the product, with the company already boasting an impressive roster of customers that includes several of the country’s largest architecture firms, such as HGA, HKS and Cooper Carry. And the platform has delivered compelling results – for example, one residential developer was able to identify energy solutions that cost $2 million less than the building’s original model. With the funds from its seed round, Cove.Tool plans further enhance its sales effort while continuing to develop additional features for the platform.

Changing decision-making and fighting climate change

The value proposition Cove.Tool hopes to offer is clear – the company wants to make it easier, faster and cheaper for firms to use innovative design processes that help identify the most cost-effective and energy-efficient solutions for their buildings, all while reducing the risks of redesign, delay and budget overruns.

Longer-term, the company hopes that it can help the building industry move towards more innovative project processes and more informed decision-making while making a serious dent in the fight against emissions.

“We want to change the way decisions are made. We want decisions to move away from being just intuition to become more data-driven.” The co-founders told TechCrunch.

“Ultimately we want to help stop climate change one building at a time. Stopping climate change is such a huge undertaking but if we can change the behavior of buildings it can be a bit easier. Architects and engineers are working hard but they need help and we need to change.”

New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission approves minimum wage rules for app-based drivers

Published December 4, 2018

The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission has approved new rules designed to provide a minimum hourly wage of $17.22 (after expenses) for drivers who work with app-based services like Uber, Lyft, Via and Juno.

Fast Company reports that the rules try to deliver that wage by requiring drivers be paid according to a formula that incorporates mileage, time and utilization rate (the average percentage of time drivers have passengers in their cars). They also call for a higher payment when drivers have to take passengers far outside the city (to compensate for them for the return trip).

A proposed bonus payment for drivers offering Uber Pool and other shared-ride options appears to have been removed from the rules.

The Independent Drivers Guild, a labor organization that advocates for drivers, has been advocating for these changes, and it praised the TLC vote in a press release.

“Today we brought desperately needed relief to 80,000 working families,” said IDG founder Jim Conigliaro, Jr. “All workers deserve the protection of a fair, livable wage and we are proud to be setting the new bar for contractor workers’ rights in America. We are thankful to the Mayor, Commissioner [Meera] Joshi and the Taxi and Limousine Commission, City Council Member Brad Lander and all of the city officials who listened to and stood up for drivers.”

And The New York Taxi Workers Alliance issued a statement from Executive Director Bhairavi Desai:

It’s the first real attempt anywhere to stop app driver pay cuts, which is an Uber and Lyft business practice at the heart of poverty wages … Ultimately, the TLC needs to regulate Uber and Lyft passenger rates, guarantee that app drivers get 80 percent of those rates, and regulate the yellow/green meter to charge the same minimum rates, so drivers across the industry can earn a raise.

Uber and Lyft, meanwhile, criticized the decision, though with careful wording emphasizing that the companies aren’t opposed to ensuring that drivers receive a living wage.

New York City Council votes to cap licenses for ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft

“Uber supports efforts to ensure that full-time drivers in NYC – whether driving with taxi, limo or Uber – are able to make a living wage, without harming outer borough riders who have been ignored by yellow taxi and underserved by mass transit,” said Uber Director of Public Affairs Jason Post in a statement. “The TLC’s implementation of the City Council’s legislation to increase driver earnings will lead to higher than necessary fare increases for riders while missing an opportunity to deal with congestion in Manhattan’s central business district.”

Post argued that the rules do not account for the bonuses and other incentive payments that Uber and other companies might make. He criticized the TLC for adopting “an industry-wide utilization rate that does not hold bases accountable for keeping cars full with paying passengers.”

And here’s the statement from Lyft:

Lyft believes all drivers should earn a livable wage and we are committed to helping drivers reach their goals. Unfortunately, the TLC’s proposed pay rules will undermine competition by allowing certain companies to pay drivers lower wages, and disincentive drivers from giving rides to and from areas outside Manhattan. These rules would be a step backward for New Yorkers, and we urge the TLC to reconsider them.

Specifically Lyft says that companies would be able to essentially pay drivers less by claiming a higher utilization rate than the industry average. It also says that it will be nearly impossible to implement the higher out-of-town payment rates in the 30-day window before the new rules take effect.

Update: You can read the new Driver Income and Transparency Rules here.

“Convenience costs, and going forward, that cost will no longer be borne by the driver,” said TLC Chair Meera Joshi in a statement. “Today’s rules will raise driver earnings by on average $10,000 a year and require companies to be completely transparent on how they calculate pay and car leasing costs.”

Uber Eats test lets restaurants trade discounts for ranking boost

Published December 4, 2018

Uber Eats has effectively invented its own native ad unit. Uber confirmed to TechCrunch that a test quietly running in markets around India allows restaurants to bundle several food items together and sell them at a discounted price in exchange for promoted placement by Uber Eats in a featured section of local “Specials.” In some cases, restaurants foot the cost of the discount, while in others Uber pays for the discounts.

The Uber Specials feature demonstrates the massive leverage awarded to food delivery apps that aggregate restaurants. Users often come to Uber Eats and its competitors without a specific restaurant in mind. Uber can then point those customers to whichever food supplier it prefers. The suppliers in turn will increasingly compete for the favor of the aggregators — not just in terms of food quality, speed and review scores, but also in terms of discounts. The aggregators will win users if they offer the best deals; creating a network effect makes restaurants more keen to play ball.

TechCrunch first learned of Uber’s ambitions in the space from a mock-up of the Promoted Items Value Section feature spotted in its app by mobile researcher and frequent TC tipster Jane Manchun Wong. The fictional food items included “Best Beer” that “is made from only the finest gutter swill” and “Weird Fries” that “will so utterly decimate your sense of good food that you will be permanently reduced to a whimpering shell of your former self!” This jokey text that seemingly was never meant for public viewing also noted that the fries are so good you should “throw all your other food in the garbage right now!” Uber assured us these weren’t real.

But what it did confirm is that the discounts for promoted placement test is live in India. “We’re always experimenting with ways to make it easier to find your favorite foods on Uber Eats,, according to a statement provided by an Uber spokesperson.

The feature allows restaurants to create a bundled meal at a certain price point, such as a chicken sandwich, french fries and a drink at a price that’s less than the sum of its parts. The company tells me the goal is to take the friction out of ordering by giving people pre-set meals at a better price prominently available in the app. Attracting more customers that have plenty of other options could offset the discount. Businesses could also use it to bundle high-margin items, like soft drinks, with meals, or to get rid of overstock.

Ben Thompson’s aggregation theory describes how power accrues to aggregators that match supply with demand

It’s already common for restaurants to make “specials” out of food they have too much of. That butternut squash ravioli might only be featured because they can’t get rid of it. In that sense, you could think of Uber Specials as the inverse of surge pricing. When supply is too high, restaurants can offer discounts to gain more demand. It’s also not far off from Google Search’s keyword ads where business pay for more visibility.

Uber wouldn’t discuss whether it plans to bring the strategy to other markets, but it makes sense to assume it’s considering expansion. Done wrong, it could look a bit like Uber Eats is pressuring restaurants to surrender discounts if they want to be discoverable inside its app. If restaurants within Uber Eats get into heated competition to offer discounts, it could drive down their profits. But done right, Specials could look like a triple-win. Restaurants can offload surplus and bundle in high-margin items while scoring new customers from enhanced placement, customers get cheaper food options and Uber Eats becomes people’s go-to app for easy-to-order discounted meals.

AT&T says it’s getting that 5G Samsung phone, too

Published December 4, 2018

Samsung announced yesterday that it’s set to bring a 5G phone to market in the first half of next year, name-checking Verizon in the promise. This morning, however, AT&T was quick to note that it will also be getting its hand on the still-unnamed handset in the first half of 2019.

The carrier issued a next-day press release which, like Verizon’s, is less focused on information about the handset than self-congratulatory statements about the two companies involved. AT&T promises “unforeseen possibilities for the tech,” while pledging to “bring the best in technology and innovation to our customers.”

The company’s also quick to note that the untitled Samsung isn’t its first planned 5G device. That title belongs to a mobile hotspot the company announced back in October. The company hasn’t offered up a release date on that one, but the first half of 2019 seems like a pretty safe bet for that product, too.

As noted yesterday, companies like OnePlus and Motorola have already promised to release 5G handsets at some point next year. Apple, on the other hand, isn’t expected to go 5G with the iPhone until 2020.

YouTube rolls out autoplaying (but silent) videos on its mobile app’s homepage

Published December 4, 2018

YouTube on Monday announced a significant change to its mobile app — it will now autoplay videos by default when users are browsing the app’s home page, aka the “Home” tab. Fortunately, the videos will not autoplay with the sound enabled, the company says. Instead, the feature is meant to give users a preview of the video while scrolling through the Home section, so they can better decide if it’s something they want to watch.

The feature, which YouTube calls “Autoplay on Home,” is enabled by default. However, the app will introduce settings that will allow users to control their experience. Users can opt to turn the feature off entirely, if they choose, or they can opt to have autoplay only enabled when they’re connected to a Wi-Fi network.

Autoplay for Home is not an entirely new feature. It’s actually been up-and-running for over half a year for YouTube Premium members on Android. Premium is YouTube’s subscription offering, which removes the ads from YouTube while also offering other perks like downloads for offline access to videos, background play and access to YouTube Music and YouTube Originals.

Starting this week, Autoplay on Home is rolling out beyond Premium subscribers to all those who use the YouTube app on iOS and Android. As with most launches across YouTube, it’s a staged rollout — meaning you may not see autoplay immediately. YouTube says it will take a few weeks for the rollout to complete.

The company notes it made the decision to expand autoplay because it increases users’ engagement time with videos.

As YouTube explains in an announcement on its product forum (spotted first by Tubefilter): “previewing videos helps you make more informed decisions about whether you want to watch a video, leading to longer engagement with videos you choose to watch.”

The company also detailed its decision further in a YouTube Help video (embedded below) where it noted that autoplay’s launch doesn’t mean thumbnails are going away. Instead, YouTube will display the thumbnail first during a brief pause before the video begins to autoplay.

With the launch of autoplay, YouTube also noted that captions would become more important.

Today, the number of videos with captions enabled tops 2 billion, it said. The site offers a variety of options for captions, including automated captions (which aren’t always perfect), creator-uploaded captions and crowdsourced community captions.

It’s not surprising to see YouTube adopt autoplay, given that rivals, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others already do the same, as do some streaming services, like Netflix.

User reaction, following YouTube’s announcement on Twitter, has been mixed. Some people said they were looking forward to the feature, while others lamented that it’s now just another setting they have to turn off.

Microsoft and Docker team up to make packaging and running cloud-native applications easier

Published December 4, 2018

Microsoft and Docker today announced a new joint open-source project, the Cloud Native Application Bundle (CNAB), that aims to make the lifecycle management of cloud-native applications easier. At its core, the CNAB is nothing but a specification that allows developers to declare how an application should be packaged and run. With this, developers can define their resources and then deploy the application to anything from their local workstation to public clouds.

The specification was born inside Microsoft, but as the team talked to Docker, it turns out that the engineers there were working on a similar project. The two decided to combine forces and launch the result as a single open-source project. “About a year ago, we realized we’re both working on the same thing,” Microsoft’s Gabe Monroy told me. “We decided to combine forces and bring it together as an industry standard.”

As part of this, Microsoft is launching its own reference implementation of a CNAB client today. Duffle, as it’s called, allows users to perform all the usual lifecycle steps (install, upgrade, uninstall), create new CNAB bundles and sign them cryptographically. Docker is working on integrating CNAB into its own tools, too.

Microsoft also today launched Visual Studio extension for building and hosting these bundles, as well as an example implementation of a bundle repository server and an Electron installer that lets you install a bundle with the help of a GUI.

Now it’s worth noting that we’re talking about a specification and reference implementations here. There is obviously a huge ecosystem of lifecycle management tools on the market today that all have their own strengths and weaknesses. “We’re not going to be able to unify that tooling,” said Monroy. “I don’t think that’s a feasible goal. But what we can do is we can unify the model around it, specifically the lifecycle management experience as well as the packaging and distribution experience. That’s effectively what Docker has been able to do with the single-workload case.”

Over time, Microsoft and Docker would like for the specification to end up in a vendor-neutral foundation. Which one remains to be seen, though the Open Container Initiative seems like the natural home for a project like this.

FortressIQ raises $12M to bring new AI twist to process automation

Published December 4, 2018

FortressIQ, a startup that wants to bring a new kind of artificial intelligence to process automation called imitation learning, emerged from stealth this morning and announced it has raised $12 million.

The Series A investment came entirely from a single venture capital firm, Light Speed Venture Partners. Today’s funding comes on top of $4 million in seed capital the company raised previously from Boldstart Ventures, Comcast Ventures and Eniac Ventures.

Pankaj Chowdhry, founder and CEO of FortressIQ, says that his company basically replaces high-cost consultants who are paid to do time and motion studies and automates that process in a fairly creative way. It’s a bit like Robotics Process Automation (RPA), a space that is attracting a lot of investment right now, but instead of simply recording what’s happening on the desktop, and reproducing that digitally, it takes it a step further in a process called “imitation learning.”

“We want to be able to replicate human behavior through observation. We’re targeting this idea of how can we help people understand their processes. But imitation learning is I think the most interesting area of artificial intelligence because it focuses not on what AI can do, but how can AI learn and adapt,” he explained

They start by capturing a low-bandwidth movie of the process. “So we build virtual processors. And basically the idea is we have an agent that gets deployed by your enterprise IT group, and it integrates into the video card,” Chowdhry explained.

He points out that it’s not actually using a camera, but it captures everything going on, as a person interacts with a Windows desktop. In that regard it’s similar to RPA. “The next component is our AI models and computer vision. And we build these models that can literally watch the movie and transcribe the movie into what we call a series of software interactions,” he said.

Another key differentiator here is that they have built a data mining component on top of this, so if the person in the movie is doing something like booking an invoice, and stops to check email or Slack, FortressIQ can understand when an activity isn’t part of the process and filters that out automatically.

The product will be offered as a cloud service. Chowdhry’s previous company, Third Pillar Systems, was acquired by Genpact in 2013.

Fortnite-maker aims for Steam’s head with Epic Games Store

Published December 4, 2018

Fortnite-maker Epic Games is capping off their insanely successful 2018 with an even more ambitious product launch: a desktop games store built to take on Valve’s Steam Store.

The store, which is “launching soon” on PC and Mac, is going to be an attractive proposition to game developers with a revenue split that leaves them taking 88 percent of revenues on the store.

“As a developer ourselves, we have always wanted a platform with great economics that connects us directly with our players,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in an emailed statement. “Thanks to the success of Fortnite, we now have this and are ready to share it with other developers.”

Valve’s Steam Store is by far the most dominant presence in online PC game sales; they’ve enjoyed years of prosperity with rather light rivalry from competing stores that haven’t been able to match the scale of Steam. Valve, in a very conveniently timed announcement yesterday, announced that it was rehashing its revenue split with developers in a bid that they hope will keep higher-earning developers on the platform. While Valve will continue to take an App Store-like 30 percent from sales of game makers with less than 10 million in revenue, that figure drops to 25 percent until they hit 50 million revenue, from which point the slice drops to 20 percent.

Valve changes revenue-sharing tiers on Steam

It’s a more complicated revenue split that obviously benefits successful game makers more so than indies. For Valve, holding onto big-game publishers is mission critical. Epic Games already has the benefit of a close working relationship with many major PC game developers that are using the company’s Unreal Engine to build their titles.

Epic Games earns money with their Unreal Engine by taking a slice of revenues from game makers. Generally that share is 5 percent after the title is released, though Epic also does deals with developers for higher upfront costs with a lower royalty rate. Publishers like EA, Sony Interactive, Microsoft Studios, Activision and Nintendo have titles out that are built on the Unreal Engine.

A big sell for developers using Epic’s game engine is that the company says it will forego that Unreal revenue cut for any sales of the titles in the Epic Games Store. Depending on the early success of the game store, this could be a big threat to other game engines like Unity.

A 12 percent overall revenue slice for Epic Games is incredibly competitive and could have left a lot of big developers grumbling about the 30 percent cut they were missing out on because of Steam’s take.

Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite, raises $1.25 billion

Epic Games has notably eschewed storefront revenue splits on Fortnite wherever they can. The app isn’t on Steam for starters, but even on Android, users are forced to download it directly from the Epic Games site as well. This kind of highlights the sway that big studios hold in the market. This year that studio happens to be Epic Games, but in the future that will be some other studio and Valve likely doesn’t want the next blockbuster side-stepping their storefront.

Valve still has a lot going for them. Their store is a massive presence, and die-hard users already have a library of titles built up with little incentive to switch unless their favorite game makers are the ones to decide to shift their allegiances.

Fivetran announces $15M Series A to build automated data pipelines

Published December 4, 2018

Fivetran, a startup that builds automated data pipelines between data repositories and cloud data warehouses and analytics tools, announced a $15 million Series A investment led by Matrix Partners.

Fivetran helps move data from source repositories like Salesforce and NetSuite to data warehouses like Snowflake or analytics tools like Looker. Company CEO and co-founder George Fraser says the automation is the key differentiator here between his company and competitors like Informatica and SnapLogic.

“What makes Fivetran different is that it’s an automated data pipeline to basically connect all your sources. You can access your data warehouse, and all of the data just appears and gets kept updated automatically,” Fraser explained. While he acknowledges that there is a great deal of complexity behind the scenes to drive that automation, he stresses that his company is hiding that complexity from the customer.

The company launched out of Y Combinator in 2012, and other than $4 million in seed funding along the way, it has relied solely on revenue up until now. That’s a rather refreshing approach to running an enterprise startup, which typically requires piles of cash to build out sales and marketing organizations to compete with the big guys they are trying to unseat.

One of the key reasons they’ve been able to take this approach has been the company’s partner strategy. Having the ability to get data into another company’s solution with a minimum of fuss and expense has attracted data-hungry applications. In addition to the previously mentioned Snowflake and Looker, the company counts Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Redshift, Tableau, Periscope Data, Salesforce, NetSuite and PostgreSQL as partners.

Ilya Sukhar, general partner at Matrix Partners, who will be joining the Fivetran board under the terms of deal sees a lot of potential here. “We’ve gone from companies talking about the move to the cloud to preparing to execute their plans, and the most sophisticated are making Fivetran, along with cloud data warehouses and modern analysis tools, the backbone of their analytical infrastructure,” Sukhar said in a statement.

They currently have 100 employees spread out across four offices in Oakland, Denver, Bangalore and Dublin. They boast 500 customers using their product including Square, WeWork, Vice Media and Lime Scooters, among others.