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$35M-funded Omni rentals in acqui-hire talks with Coinbase
Physical storage-turned-rentals startup Omni is dealing with layoffs today, two sources familiar with the situation tell TechCrunch. Omni just shed seven operations team members. The startup is in talks to sell its engineering team to Coinbase after also receiving interest from Thumbtack.
Omni’s rental business was doing poorly without enough users paying a few bucks to borrow a tent, bike or power drill. Omni had planned to launch a white-labeled platform allowing brick-and-mortar merchants to operate and market their own rental business.
But despite having plenty of cash left after raising $25 million from cryptocurrency company Ripple early last year, Omni feared the new platform would flop too and its prospects would worsen.
The company is in talks with Coinbase to hire some of the engineering staff, who would have them work on Coinbase Earn, which rewards users with cryptocurrency for completing online educational programs. Some employees are interviewing at Coinbase today. However, a Coinbase spokesperson told me there’s currently no official deal — before noting that there is nothing on the record they can share. Omni promised TechCrunch a statement but then refused to talk on the record.
Omni got its start in on-demand storage, where it would come to your home, pick up and tag your stuff, store it in a warehouse and bring it back whenever you wanted it. It grew popular in San Francisco and started to scale out to other cities. In April, Omni began allowing users to earn money by renting out their stored goods to other Omni customers.
But by May, Omni was selling its storage business to SoftBank-funded competitor Clutter, and the transition was rocky. Users complained about changing prices and misplaced items, alarmed that suddenly a different startup had control of their possessions.
I was formerly a happy Omni customer of its storage business, but the transition to Clutter was botched and shook faith that users’ stuff would be taken care of. At one point they lost some of my belongings, until C-level executives stepped in to figure out what happened.
Going forward, instead of storing goods itself, Omni would rely on local storefronts for pickup and drop-off of rentals. But many users balked at the hassle of rentals when Amazon makes buying so easy.
One source said that Omni had discussed telling rental partners in two weeks that it would be shutting down the rental service, though TechCrunch cannot confirm that. Another source said Omni was frantically trying to stop members of its team from talking to the press today.
Omni’s vision of cloud storage for the physical world and access over ownership had attracted capital from Flybridge, Highland, Allen & Company, Founders Fund, Precursor and a wide array of angels. But efforts to change user behavior and operate a logistically complicated business, matched with spotty execution, led the startup to hit the skids and seek a soft landing.
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How ‘the Internet broke America’ with The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz
When Elizabeth Warren took on Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook earlier this week, it was a low moment for what New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz calls “techno-utopianism.”
That the progressive, populist Massachusetts Senator and leading Democratic Presidential candidate wants to #BreakUpBigTech is not surprising. But Warren’s choice to spotlight regulating and trust-busting Facebook was nonetheless noteworthy, because of what it represents on a philosophical level. Warren, along with like-minded political leaders, social activists, and tech critics, has begun to offer the first massively popular alternative to the massively popular wave of aggressive optimism and “genius” ambition that characterized tech culture for the past decade or two.
“No,” Warren and others seem to say, “your vision is not necessarily making the world a better place.” This is a major buzzkill for tech leaders who have made (positive) world-changing their number one calling card — more than profits, popularity, skyscrapers like San Francisco’s striking Salesforce Tower, or any other measure.
Enter Marantz, a longtime New Yorker staff writer and Brooklyn, N.Y. resident who has recently trained his attention on tech culture, following around iconic figures on both sides of what he sees as the divide of our time — not between tech greats whose successes make us all better and those who would stop them, but between the alternative figures on the “new right” and the self-understood liberals of Silicon Valley who, according to Marantz, have both contributed to “hijacking the American conversation.”
Image via Penguin Random House
Marantz’s first book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation,” will be released next week, and I recently had a chance to talk with him for this series the ethics of technology.
Greg Epstein: Congratulations on your absolutely fascinating new book Antisocial, and on everything you’ve been up to.
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Annual Extra Crunch members can receive $1,000 in AWS credits
We’re excited to announce a new partnership with Amazon Web Services for annual members of Extra Crunch. Starting today, qualified annual members can receive $1,000 in AWS credits. You also must be a startup founder to claim this Extra Crunch community perk.
AWS is the premier service for your application hosting needs, and we want to make sure our community is well-resourced to build. We understand that hosting and infrastructure costs can be a major hurdle for tech startups, and we’re hoping that this offer will help better support your team.
What’s included in the perk:
- $1,000 in AWS Promotional Credit valid for 1 year
- 2 months of AWS Business Support
- 80 credits for self-paced labs
Applications are processed in 7-10 days, once an application is received. Companies may not be eligible for AWS Promotional Credits if they previously received a similar or greater amount of credit. Companies may be eligible to be “topped up” to a higher credit amount if they previously received a lower credit.
In addition to the AWS community perk, Extra Crunch members also get access to how-tos and guides on company building, intelligence on what’s happening in the startup ecosystem, stories about founders and exits, transcripts from panels at TechCrunch events, discounts on TechCrunch events, no banner ads on TechCrunch.com and more. To see a full list of the types of articles you get with Extra Crunch, head here.
You can sign up for annual Extra Crunch membership here.
Once you are signed up, you’ll receive a welcome email with a link to the AWS offer. If you are already an annual Extra Crunch member, you will receive an email with the offer at some point today. If you are currently a monthly Extra Crunch subscriber and want to upgrade to annual in order to claim this deal, head over to the “my account” section on TechCrunch.com and click the “upgrade” button.
This is one of several new community perks we’ve been working on for Extra Crunch members. Extra Crunch members also get 20% off all TechCrunch event tickets (email extracrunch@techcrunch.com with the event name to receive a discount code for event tickets). You can learn more about our events lineup here. You also can read about our Brex community perk here.
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Greyparrot uses computer vision to improve waste management
Meet Greyparrot, a London-based startup that wants to improve waste management. The company uses computer vision to make sorting more efficient at different stages of the waste chain. And Greyparrot has been selected as a wildcard for the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt SF.
The company has been using machine learning with images of different types of waste to train a model that detects glass, paper, cardboard, newspapers, cans and different types of plastics (black trays, PET, HDPE).
Greyparrot can then use a simple camera combined with a computer to sort waste in a fraction of a second.
There are many different use cases for this kind of technology, but it seems particularly promising in sorting facilities. Those facilities already use a ton of machines to separate small and big objects, metal from plastics, etc. But many of them still rely on humans at the end of the process to pick up the last remaining false positive objects.
While it’s never possible to sort everything with a 100% accuracy, you want to get as close as possible to 100%. Sorting facilities create huge cubes of PET plastics and send them to countries on the other side of the world so that they can transform PET into something else.
In some cases, those cubes are not pure enough. For instance, Indonesia regularly refuses containers of waste and send them back to the U.S. or Europe.
Greyparrot wants to help with the last step of the sorting process. The product can be used to assess the purity of a conveyor belt to see if it’s good enough. It can also identify problematic objects and give coordinates to a sorting robot so that it can automatically pick up impurities.
The startup has been testing its solution in facilities in the U.K. and South Korea. It has raised $1.2 million so far.
In the future, Greyparrot also has other ideas of use cases. For instance, you could imagine embedding Greyparrot’s technology in a smart bin to automatically sort waste from the very beginning. You could also use Greyparrot in reverse vending machines and credit your account when you return plastic bottles.
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StrattyX lets you buy and sell shares using automated rules
StrattyX is a trading interface that lets you set up sophisticated “if-this-then-that” rules and execute orders on the stock market. The startup is participating in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt SF.
There are plenty of brokers that let you buy and sell shares using a mobile app and a web interface. But if you want to access more sophisticated tools and automate strategies, there’s not much you can do.
StrattyX wants to open up automated trading software to anyone, from non-professional traders who have some savings to professional day traders. The startup focuses on this specific part of the process.
It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel and it doesn’t want to become an online stock broker. Instead, the company integrates with existing brokers, such as Robinhood, TD Ameritrade and many others as long as they support trading via an API. It acts as an interface and executes orders on your behalf.
You can create rules based on multiple different factors. In addition to traditional stop-loss and stop-limit orders, you can say that you want to buy or sell shares if something happens on Twitter, in the news or on the stock market.
Here are a few examples of rules you can create:
- If @realdonaldtrump tweets something that contains “China” or “tariff,” sell Apple shares.
- If the value of EUR drops by 2% against USD, buy LVMH shares.
- If news headline contains “Tesla delays deliveries,” sell Tesla shares.
Interestingly, StrattyX will provide a marketplace of strategies. If a star investor starts using StrattyX to define a set of automated rules, other users could follow the same strategy.
StrattyX then wants to go one step further by giving you the tools to train a model using machine learning and user-generated data sets. You could imagine a feature that lets you upload a .csv file with price history and different types of data points, such as SEC filings, earnings, etc.
The company is also working on a feature that would show you news headlines that you’d rate with a Tinder-style swipe gesture — swipe right if you think it’s good news, swipe left if you think it’s bad news.
StrattyX is launching its mobile app today. It’s a sort of minimum viable product for now — some features are still in beta. The company is also working on a desktop version that would be useful for professional traders in particular.
StrattyX initially costs $5 per month per user, with more expensive plans for bigger teams and whether you execute a lot of orders through the product. The startup is looking to raise a seed round in the coming months.
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LifeCouple wants to improve your romantic relationship
Good relationships require ongoing commitment and work. LifeCouple, launching today in public beta at TechCrunch Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield, wants to help make that work a bit easier for you and your partner.
Through its app, LifeCouple enables couples to address and monitor any challenges in their relationship. The startup does this by serving up content designed to encourage people to look more closely at their relationship across four key areas: trust, communication, conflict and intimacy. The content includes daily relationship challenges, ice breakers to help approach tricky conversations, digital gifts and more.
LifeCouple is designed to supplement couples therapy, its founder Sean Rones told TechCrunch.
“It’s not a replacement to therapy but it’s a complement to it,” he said. “I don’t think this can 100% solve your problem but it can give you the tools to solve your problems.”
Additionally, Rones envisions couples therapists using this tool to further assist their clients.
Just how startups use technology to track fitness and health, LifeCouple aims to help people create relationship goals, address those goals and track them over time. The ideal is for people to spend about 15 minutes per day to get the most out of it, Rones said.
“What motivated me is after many different startups, I’ve learned that in order to be somewhat successful, you have to be tackling a really big problem,” he said.
LifeCouple is currently free, but is working to determine the cost moving forward. In the first two months of its soft launch, LifeCouple amassed 2,500 users in the U.S.
“What we’re trying to do is create something that can help — even if it’s just 10 couples that stay together,” Rones said.
This year, LifeCouple raised a $575,000 seed round. The plan is to do a full launch in January.
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Zola, the $650M wedding portal, taps the travel market with an expansion into honeymoons
The wedding industry is estimated to be worth some $100 billion in the U.S. alone, and now one of the fastest-growing companies in that space — the wedding planning site Zola — is making a move to augment its position with a sidestep into travel. Today at Disrupt (our conference in San Francisco), the company is announcing Honeymoons, which will let couples plan, book and raise money for their post-nuptial travels at the same time that they plan the main event.
The beta invite is open for those interested from today. To start off, couples will be able to plan itineraries and book accommodations, with flights getting added in after the launch as part of a bigger effort to own the end-to-end marriage experience.
“Over time, we want to book all your travel needs, both before and after the wedding,” said Shan-Lyn Ma, the company’s CEO and founder.
Zola’s business today is based around pre-wedding organization: users can set up free websites, design and print (paid) wedding invitations, and create Zola-based gift registries for family and friends to buy goods for the couple through the site — a business that has been successful enough to net the company more than $140 million in funding and a $650 million valuation.
But the average time spent planning weddings is 13-18 months, and so Honeymoons will be one way for Zola to extend that relationship not just in terms of money spent — honeymoons is estimated to be a $12 billion industry in the U.S. — but time spent using Zola, which in turn can help build a tighter relationship for whatever moves the company might make in the future. (One very obvious next step: parenting-related content and products.)
The Honeymoons feature also brings something else to Zola: a little breathing space. The online market for wedding planning is old and massive — it’s one of the first kinds of e-commerce sites that emerged with the rise of the world wide web itself, and as such there are a lot of large and incumbent competitors. However, “honeymoons” has been generally a more fragmented space, where people plan their own trips themselves via sites that cater to other kinds of travel like vacations, making “online honeymoon planning” far less of an industry per se, and making Zola’s move into the area relatively less pressured.
Ma said that the decision to launch the business came from couples requesting the feature, and it’s taking the rollout relatively slowly. The service will start with a limited number of markets that Zola chose based on them already being popular honeymoon destinations. The plan will be to expand the list to many more locations over time.
“We know where all the key destinations are based on demand from couples,” she added.
Within that list, Zola has negotiated special packages for accommodation and flights. It will also come with a personalized twist: couples input their preferences and are offered honeymoon packages designed to fit their tastes.
“Through our technology and our team of travel experts, couples can tell us, this is what they would love to do for their honeymoon,” explained Ma. “This is their general travel style, budget and dates. Then we will send back an itinerary…[and they can] book with us from there. At launch next month, it will be focused first and foremost on accommodation and experiences. Over time, we would aim to help you with everything you need to do on your honeymoon,” she said.
Ma said thousands of customers have already signed up for the waitlist for the new honeymoons product, which will officially launch next month.
Zola already has a strong connection to a wider marketplace that taps into how millennials and younger consumers, in general, like to shop today, offering a Houzz-style approach of letting users create “look books” for their aesthetics, and giving them flexibility to either register for specific items, or to cash out in gift cards that can be used on other goods and services.
The Honeymoons move will give the company an opening to working with other companies much more closely, specifically those in the travel industry, to create cohesive experiences. Given how many weddings today are focused around “destinations,” this also opens the door to planning events for more than just the couples involved.
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WeWork expected to announce major layoffs
WeWork, the co-working business once valued at $47 billion, is expected to announce significant layoffs this month, Bloomberg reports. This follows reports the company was looking to slash as many as 5,000 roles, or one-third of its workforce.
Now expected to go public in 2020 at a valuation as low as $10 billion, WeWork is also in negotiations with JPMorgan for a last-minute cash infusion to replace the capital expected from the now-postponed IPO, per reports. The company, now a cautionary tale, has been working with bankers in recent weeks to reduce the sky-high costs of its money-losing operation.
News of potential layoffs come about two weeks after co-founder and chief executive officer Adam Neumann resigned from his post and the nine-year-old company postponed its highly anticipated initial public offering. Neumann is now serving as the company’s non-executive chairman, succeeded by WeWork’s former vice chairman Sebastian Gunningham and the company’s president and chief operating officer Artie Minson.
The embattled company has been struggling to satisfy Wall Street skeptics, who were floored by the company’s eye-popping valuation. Since Neumann’s resignation, WeWork has begun several cost-cutting initiatives and is reportedly looking to sell off several of its acquisitions, including Managed by Q, Conductor and Meetup.
Layoffs are a natural next step for the business as it aims to carve out a clear path to profitability, now a requisite for a 2020 IPO. To float at any point in the future, after all, WeWork must prove elevating “the world’s consciousness” will eventually lead to profits.
WeWork revealed an unusual IPO prospectus in August after raising more than $8 billion in equity and debt funding. Despite financials that showed losses of nearly $1 billion in the six months ending June 30, the company still managed to accumulate a valuation as high as $47 billion, largely as a result of Neumann’s fundraising abilities.
“As co-founder of WeWork, I am so proud of this team and the incredible company that we have built over the last decade,” Neumann said in a statement confirming his resignation. “Our global platform now spans 111 cities in 29 countries, serving more than 527,000 members each day. While our business has never been stronger, in recent weeks, the scrutiny directed toward me has become a significant distraction, and I have decided that it is in the best interest of the company to step down as chief executive. Thank you to my colleagues, our members, our landlord partners, and our investors for continuing to believe in this great business.”
WeWork declined to comment.
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We’ll have self-flying cars before self-driving cars, Thrun says
Once you get up high enough, you don’t have to worry about a lot of the obstacles like pedestrians and traffic jams that plague autonomous cars. That’s why Sebastian Thrun, Google’s self-driving team founder turned CEO of flying vehicle startup Kitty Hawk, said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF today that we should expect true autonomy to succeed in the air before the road.
“I believe we’re going to be done with self-flying vehicles before we’re done with self-driving cars,” Thrun told TechCrunch reporter Kirsten Korosec.
Why? “If you go a bit higher in the air then all the difficulties with not hitting stuff like children and bicycles and cars and so on just vanishes . . . Go above the buildings, go above the trees, like go where the helicopters are!” Thrun explained, but noted personal helicopters are so noisy they’re being banned in some places like Napa, Calif.
That proclamation has wide-reaching implications for how cities are planned and real estate is bought. We may need more vertical take-off helipads sooner than we needed autonomous car-only road lanes. More remote homes in the forest that have only a single winding road that reaches them like those in Big Sur, Calif. might suddenly become more accessible and thereby appealing to the affluent because they could just take a self-flying car to the city or office.
The concept could also have wide-reaching implications for the startup industry. Obviously Thrun’s own company, Kitty Hawk, would benefit from not being too early to market. Kitty Hawk announced its Heaviside vehicle today that’s designed to be ultra quiet. If the prophecy comes true, Uber, which is investing in vertical take-off vehicles, could also be in a better position than Lyft and other ride-hailing players focused on cars.
To make sure its vehicles don’t get banned and potentially pave the way for more aerial autonomy, Kitty Hawk recently recruited former FAA Administrator Mike Huerta as an advisor.
Eventually, Thrun says that because cars have to navigate indirect streets but in the air “we can go in a straight line, we believe we will be roughly a third of the energy cost per mile as Tesla.” And with shared UberPool-style flights, he sees the cost of energy getting down to just “$0.30 per mile.”
But in the meantime, Thrun is trying to get people, including me, to stop saying flying cars. “I personally don’t like the word ‘flying car,’ but it’s very catchy. The technical term is called eVTOL. These are typically electrically propelled vehicles, they can take off and land vertically, eVTOLs, vertical take-off landing, so that you don’t need an airport. And then they fly very much like a regular plane.” We’ll see if that mouthful catches on, and if the skies get more congested before the roads thin out.
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Orbit Fab raises $3M to make orbital refueling easier, cheaper and more accessible
Orbit Fab, one of the companies competing in this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in San Francisco this week, has closed a seed round of $3 million. The funding comes from Type 1 Ventures, TechStars and others, and will help Orbit Fab continue to build on the great momentum it has already bootstrapped with its space-based robotic refueling technology.
You might remember the name Orbit Fab from a milestone accomplishment the young company achieved earlier this year: Becoming the first startup to supply water to the International Space Station, itself an achievement but also a key demonstration of the viability of its technology for use in orbital satellite refueling. Refueling satellites could have tremendous impact on the commercial satellite business, extending the operating life of expensive satellites considerably, which translates to better margins and more profitable businesses.
Thanks to co-founders Daniel Faber and Jeremy Schiel’s connections in the space industry, from more than 15 years working in space technology businesses in a leadership capacity, the company was able to demonstrate its technology working in space less than a year after Orbit Fab was actually founded. Faber, Orbit Fab’s CEO, and Schiel, the startup’s CMO, met when both were working at Deep Space Industries – Faber as CEO and Schiel as a contractor.
Orbit Fab’s first space payload, the ISS water resupply robot.
“We ended up reconnecting later on and really looking at a few different business models on how to push the industry forward,” Schiel said in an interview. “The one that really landed with customers, and the one that resonated with the industry was refueling satellites. Elon [Musk] has been making rockets reusable – we thought it’s time that we make satellites reusable as well.”
Starting from this realization, the pair founded the company in January 2018. They then secured their first round of pre-seed investment from Bolt in San Francisco in June that year, and also landed two contracts – including one with NASA, and one with the International Space Station National Laboratory.
“Basically in four-and-a-half months, we got flight-qualified and human-rated from NASA our two tanker test beds that we flew to the International Space Station in December 2018, and March of 2019,” Shield said.
How did they do it with that speed? Faber credits their rapid progress largely to lead engineer James Bultitude, an accomplished space engineer with five payloads on the International Space Station already.
“He took [the project] from a napkin through to flight hardware in four-and-a-half months,” Faber said. “All qualified to NASA human-rated safety standards, which was quite the feat. We really had to push hard on NASA.”
Faber said that the company’s ability to spur the U.S. space agency into action has been a key driver of its success. In fact, he relayed a story in which their National Lab demonstration payload was actually left off of its intended flight, but the team was able to get its cargo approved by top NASA decision-makers over the course of a weekend and just barely made the cut as a result.
As for working with NASA as a startup, Faber said that it’s become a very different affair, with the agency eager and adapting to working more with younger companies and startups bringing a different pace of innovation to the field.
“The change is almost palpable on the phone with NASA – you can almost hear them changing,” he said.
At Disrupt, Orbit Fab demonstrated their robotic connector for refueling on stage for the first time. The idea is that satellite makers will build their standard nozzles into their designs, and then a robotic refueler will be able to seek out the nozzle, open and then close on to the coupler, forming a solid connection to allow propellant transfer.
Already, Orbit Fab is talking to partners, including Northrop Grumman, and it’s a member of the Consortium for Execution of Rendezvous and Servicing Operations (CONFERS), an industry group that aims to make robotic service and maintenance of satellites a viable reality.
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