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In the race for tech talent, the US should look to Mexico
The global tech sector is booming, and as technologies like cloud and AI accelerate their growth, the demand for tech talent outpaces supply globally. Specifically, the U.S. tech sector has seen unprecedented growth in recent years, with four tech firms reaching a $1 trillion market cap by the beginning of 2020 — all of which have seen double-digit growth since achieving a 13-digit valuation pre-pandemic.
One of the major factors in the growth and adoption of tech in the U.S. is the increasing focus on software as a service and broader digital transformations across industry sectors, which have accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, there is an insatiable appetite for quality tech talent in the U.S., with projections showing an 11% increase by 2029 from 2019 numbers, which amounts to over half a million new jobs.
Given that the U.S. produces only about 65,000 computer science graduates, there is a vast deficit in the tech talent market, which materialized as over 900,000 unfilled IT and related positions in 2019 alone. The problem is so vast that more than 80% of U.S. employers stated that recruiting for tech talent is a top business challenge, according to a survey by top HR consulting firm Robert Half.
Demand increasing for Mexican tech talent
Mexico’s tech talent can help to fill the gaps left in a hypercompetitive U.S. market for tech workers. Unlike the U.S., 20% of Mexican college graduates have relevant engineering degrees, amounting to over 110,000 per year, far surpassing the U.S. in technical talent. Investors and tech firms have noticed and are increasing operations in Mexico.
20% of Mexican college graduates have relevant engineering degrees, amounting to over 110,000 per year, far surpassing the U.S. in technical talent.
Some have referred to the cities of Monterrey and Guadalajara as the “Silicon Valley of Latin America,” and while their tech sectors are also seeing tremendous growth, the pace falls short of Mexico’s talent production, leading to a surplus of highly trained and capable individuals in the tech sector. The cost of higher education in Mexico is far less than in the U.S., so we’re likely to see that talent surplus grow in the coming years.
Under current conditions, the U.S. has an incredible opportunity to capitalize on the surplus of tech talent in Mexico. Because tech jobs are more scarce than in the U.S., the cost of talent in Mexico is considerably less than in the U.S. or in Canada. In general, talent in Mexico can be two to three times cheaper than in the U.S. while still delivering outstanding quality and specialized experience.
More so than other Latin American countries, Mexico has the experience and economy to support a robust tech talent export ecosystem. In fact, Mexico City’s concentrated market is larger than the sum total of every other Spanish-speaking country in Latin America. Specifically, Mexico’s IT outsourcing industry has been growing at an annual rate of 10%-15% and is now considered the third-largest exporter of IT services.
What’s more, the U.S./Mexico relationship is seeing a refresh after several tumultuous years. With Mexico ranked No. 1 among U.S. trade partners, the political and economic mechanisms for investments and partnerships are in place. Technology leaders such as Cisco and Intel have already set up shop in Mexico, demonstrating confidence in the country’s ability to support tech and economic growth.
The benefits of proximity
Mexico provides a number of benefits that make drawing from its talent surplus easier and more efficient. For one, Mexico’s time zones align with those in the U.S., enabling real-time collaboration at times that work best for both parties. Compare this to the time difference in India, which is over 12 hours ahead of California’s Silicon Valley.
Beyond the time difference, there are also many cultural similarities that make working with Mexico the clear choice for IT outsourcing. For example, the U.S. is home to more than 41 million native Spanish speakers, and plus over 12 million bilingual Spanish speakers, making the U.S. the second-largest Spanish-speaking country after Mexico. While difficult to quantify, the number of consumer and cultural exports from Mexico to the U.S. also helps to build familiarity and solidarity between the two countries, which can only improve an already healthy relationship.
New geopolitical considerations favor U.S.-Mexico ties
The steady progression of America’s tech sector is now seen as a strategic priority at the federal level. Meanwhile, public and private sector decision-makers are more interested than ever in conducting business under favorable trade treaty terms with friendly governments amid a new climate of geopolitical uncertainty.
As the U.S. tech sector continues its explosive growth, technology companies in the U.S. will need to seek alternative means to supplement its in-demand tech workforce. Rather than turning to countries undergoing increased regulatory scrutiny, or distant talent bases requiring significant business travel, business leaders are looking to geographically close, diplomatically friendly nations. U.S. companies are finding Mexico’s status as a key business partner and strategic ally to be a massive value driver.
By 2030, the middle-class population in Mexico is expected to reach 95 million, placing it in the top 10 countries with the highest share of global middle-class consumption. As the middle class rises, so will companies to meet their consumer needs, and, as such, Mexico’s own tech sector will grow and require significantly more tech talent, reducing or potentially eliminating Mexico’s talent surplus.
This is evidenced by the uptick in Mexico-based technology companies, such as Mexican used-car startup Kavak, which recently hit a $4 billion valuation. Amid an exciting backdrop of skyrocketing tech valuations and potential, the U.S. tech sector should look to Mexico as a key growth market and technology partner. The time is now for the U.S. to tap into the surplus of quality tech talent in Mexico.
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Portside raises $17M for its business aviation management platform
Portside, an aviation startup that is building a platform for managing the backend of a corporate flight department, charter operation, government fleet and fractional ownership operation, today announced that it has raised a $17 million funding round led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from existing investors I2BF Global Ventures and SOMA Capital.
The idea behind Portside, which was founded in 2018, is that it lets business aviation companies and flight departments manage everything from flight operations to maintenance, crew and staff scheduling, expense management for crew members and staff, and financial data to help them operate more efficiently. It’s basically everything you need to run your flight department in a single solution, but it also integrates with virtually all of the existing scheduling, accounting, expense management and maintenance tools a flight department or fractional ownership operation is likely using today.
Image Credits: Portside
While the COVID pandemic put a halt to most forms of private aviation early on, that market saw a quick rebound. Portside says it saw its revenue grow almost 300% in 2020 and that it added more than 50 aircraft operators in multiple countries to its user base.
“This infusion of new capital will be used to accelerate investment in product innovation, support further engagement with large enterprise customers and grow our global engineering and customer success teams,” said Alek Vernitsky, co-founder and CEO of Portside. “We appreciate the strong support we have received from both our existing and new investors in this round. They have collectively demonstrated their confidence in our strategy and intentional approach to cloud-based digital transformation of the global business aviation industry.”
Portside is not alone in this market. Companies like Fl3xx, for example, offer similar solutions for flight departments and at the lower end, tools like Flight Circle offer a subset of these features for general aviation clubs and partnerships.
“Portside has progressed rapidly since inception and is entering the next stage of fulfilling its vision of becoming the undisputed leader in cloud-based solutions for business aviation,” stated John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global Management. “In our view, Portside represents the future of the industry, and we are pleased to partner with a company we believe will continue to create significant value for many years to come.”
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Esper raises $30M Series B for its IoT DevOps platform
There may be billions of IoT devices in use today, but the tooling around building (and updating) the software for them still leaves a lot to be desired. Esper, which today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round, builds the tools to enable developers and engineers to deploy and manage fleets of Android-based edge devices. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Root Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures and Haystack.
The company argues that there are thousands of device manufacturers who are building these kinds of devices on Android alone, but that scaling and managing these deployments comes with a lot of challenges. The core idea here is that Esper brings to device development the DevOps experience that software developers now expect. The company argues that its tools allow companies to forgo building their own internal DevOps teams and instead use its tooling to scale their Android-based IoT fleets for use cases that range from digital signage and kiosks to custom solutions in healthcare, retail, logistics and more.
“The pandemic has transformed industries like connected fitness, digital health, hospitality, and food delivery, further accelerating the adoption of intelligent edge devices. But with each new use case, better software automation is required,” said Esper CEO and co-founder Yadhu Gopalan, who founded the company together with COO Shiv Sundar. “Esper’s mature cloud infrastructure incorporates the functionality cloud developers have come to expect, re-imagined for devices.”
Image Credits: Esper
Mobile device management (MDM) isn’t exactly a new thing, but the Esper team argues that these tools weren’t created for this kind of use case. “MDMs are the solution now in the market. They are made for devices being brought into an environment,” Gopalan said. “The DNA of these solutions is rooted in protecting the enterprise and to deploy applications to them in the network. Our customers are sending devices out into the wild. It’s an entirely different use case and model.”
To address these challenges, Esper offers a range of tools and services that includes a full development stack for developers, cloud-based services for device management and hardware emulators to get started with building custom devices.
“Esper helped us launch our Fusion-connected fitness offering on three different types of hardware in less than six months,” said Chris Merli, founder at Inspire Fitness. “Their full stack connected fitness Android platform helped us test our application on different hardware platforms, configure all our devices over the cloud, and manage our fleet exactly to our specifications. They gave us speed, Android expertise, and trust that our application would provide a delightful experience for our customers.”
The company also offers solutions for running Android on older x86 Windows devices to extend the life of this hardware, too.
“We spent about a year and a half on building out the infrastructure,” said Gopalan. “Definitely. That’s the hard part and that’s really creating a reliable, robust mechanism where customers can trust that the bits will flow to the devices. And you can also roll back if you need to.”
Esper is working with hardware partners to launch devices that come with built-in Esper-support from the get-go.
Esper says it saw 70x revenue growth in the last year, an 8x growth in paying customers and a 15x growth in devices running Esper. Since we don’t know the baseline, those numbers are meaningless, but the investors clearly believe that Esper is on to something. Current customers include the likes of CloudKitchens, Spire Health, Intelity, Ordermark, Inspire Fitness, RomTech and Uber.
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Kleiner spots Spot Meetings $5M to modernize walk-and-talks for the Zoom generation
Trees, those deciduous entities you can occasionally see outdoors when not locked down or strapped down at a desktop ruminating on a video call, have long been the inspiration for fresh new ideas. Stories abound of how founders built companies while walking the foothills in Silicon Valley or around parks in San Francisco, and yet, we’ve managed over the past year to take movement mostly out of our remote work lives.
Chicago-based Spot Meetings wants to reinvigorate our meetings — and displace Zoom as the default meeting medium at the same time.
The product and company are just a few months old and remain in closed beta (albeit opening up a bit shortly here), and today the company is announcing $5 million in seed funding led by Ilya Fushman at Kleiner Perkins. That follows a $1.9 million pre-seed round led by Chapter One earlier this year.
CEO and co-founder Greg Caplan said that the team is looking to rebuild the meeting from the ground up for an audio-only environment. “On mobile, it needs to be abundantly simple to be very functional and understood for users so that they can actually use it on the go,” he described. In practice, that requires product development across a wide range of layers.
The product’s most notable feature today is that it has an assistant, aptly named Spot, which listens in on the call and which participants can direct commands to while speaking. For instance, saying “Spot Fetch” will pull the last 40 seconds of conversation, transcribe it, create a note in the meeting and save it for follow-up. That prevents the multi-hand tapping required to save a note or to-do list for follow-up with our current meeting products. You “don’t even need to take your phone out,” Caplan points out.
What gets more interesting is the collaboration layer the company has built into the product. Every audio meeting has a text-based scratch pad shared with all participants, allowing users to copy and paste snippets into the meeting as needed. Those notes and any information that Spot pulls in are saved into workspaces that can be referenced later. Spot also sends out emails to participants with follow-ups from these notes. If the same participants join another audio meeting later, Spot will pull in the notes from their last meeting so there is a running timeline of what’s been happening.
Spot’s product design emphasizes collaboration within an audio-focused experience. Image Credits: Spot Meetings
Obviously, transcription features are built-in, but Spot sees opportunities in offering edited transcripts of long calls where only a few minutes of snippets might be worth specifically following up on. So the product is a bit more deliberate in encouraging users to select the parts of a conversation that are relevant for their needs, rather than delivering a whole bolus of text that no one is ever actually going to read.
“Collaboration from now and the future is going to be primarily digital … in-person is forever going to be the exception and not the rule,” Caplan explained. Longer term, the company wants to add additional voice commands to the product and continue building an audio-first (and really, an audio-only) environment. Audio “very uniquely helps people focus on the conversation at hand,” he said, noting that video fatigue is a very real phenomenon today for workers. To that end, more audio features like smarter muting are coming. When a participant isn’t talking, their background noise will automatically melt away.
Before Spot Meetings, Caplan was the CEO and co-founder of Remote Year, a startup that was designing a service for company employees to take working trips overseas. I first covered it back in 2015, and it went on to raise some serious venture dollars before the pandemic hit last year and the company laid off 50% of its workforce. Caplan left as CEO in April last year, and the company was ultimately sold to Selina, which offers co-working spaces to travelers, in October.
Caplan’s co-founder who leads product and engineering at Spot Meetings is Hans Petter “HP” Eikemo. The duo met during the very first Remote Year cohort. “He has been a software engineer for two decades [and was] literally the first person I called,” Caplan said. The team will grow further with the new funding, and the company hopes to start opening its beta to its 6,000 waitlist users over the next 3-4 weeks.
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OneNav locates $21M from GV to map our transition to the next generation of GPS
GPS is one of those science fiction technologies whose use is effortless for the end user and endlessly challenging for the engineers who design it. It’s now at the heart of modern life: everything from Amazon package deliveries to our cars and trucks to our walks through national parks are centered around a pin on a map that monitors us down to a few meters.
Yet, GPS technology is decades old, and it’s going through a much-needed modernization. The U.S., Europe, China, Japan and others have been installing a new generation of GNSS satellites (GNSS is the generic name for GPS, which is the specific name for the U.S. system) that will offer stronger signals in what is known as the L5 band (1176 MHz). That means more accurate map pinpoints compared to the original generation L1 band satellites, particularly in areas where line-of-sight can be obscured, like urban areas. L5 was “designed to meet demanding requirements for safety-of-life transportation and other high-performance applications,” as the U.S. government describes it.
It’s one thing to put satellites into orbit (that’s the easy part!), and another to build power-efficient chips that can scan for these signals and triangulate a coordinate (that’s the hard part!). So far, chipmakers have focused on creating hybrid chips that pull from the L1 and L5 bands simultaneously. For example, Broadcom recently announced the second-generation of its hybrid chip.
OneNav has a totally different opinion on product design, and it placed it right in its name. Eschewing the hybrid chip model of mixing old signals with new, it wants one chip monitoring the singular band of L5 signals to drive cost and power savings for devices. One nav to rule them all, as it were.
The company announced today that it has closed a $21 million Series B round led by Karim Faris at GV, which is solely funded by Alphabet. Other investors included Matthew Howard at Norwest and GSR Ventures, which invested in earlier rounds of the company. All together, OneNav has raised $33 million in capital and was founded about two years ago.
CEO and co-founder Steve Poizner has been in the location business a long time. His previous company, SnapTrack, built out a GPS positioning technology for mobile devices that sold to Qualcomm for $1 billion in stock in March 2000, at the height of the dot-com bubble. His co-founder and CTO at OneNav, Paul McBurney, has similarly spent decades in the GNSS space, most recently at Apple, according to his LinkedIn profile.
OneNav CEO and co-founder Steve Poizner, seen here in 2009. Image Credits: David McNew via Getty Images
They saw an opportunity to build a new navigation company as L5 band satellites have switched on in recent years. As they looked at the market and the L5 tech, they decided they wanted to go further than other companies by eliminating the legacy tech of older GPS technology and moving entirely into the future. By doing that, its design is “half the size of the old system, but much higher reliability and performance,” Poizner said. “We are aiming to get location technology into a much broader number of products.”
He differentiated between upgrading GPS from upgrading wireless signals. “With these L5 satellites, we don’t need the L1 satellites anymore [but] with 5G, you still need 4G,” he said. L5 band GPS does everything that earlier renditions did, but better, whereas with wireless technologies, they often need to complement each other to offer peak performance.
There’s one caveat here: The L5 signal is still considered “pre-operational” by the U.S. government, since the U.S. GPS system only has 16 satellites broadcasting the signal today, and is targeting 24 satellites for full deployment by later in this decade. However, other countries have also deployed L5 GNSS satellites, which means that while it may not be fully operational from the U.S. government’s perspective, it may well be good enough for consumers.
OneNav’s goal according to Poizner is to be “the Arm of the GNSS space.” What he means is that like Arm, which produces the chip designs for nearly all mobile phones globally, OneNav creates comprehensive designs for L5 band GPS chips that can be integrated as a system-on-chip into the products of other manufacturers so that they can “embed a high-performance location engine based on their silicon.”
The company today also announced that its first design customer will be In-Q-Tel, the U.S. intelligence community’s venture capital and business development organization. Poizner said that through In-Q-Tel, “we now have a development contract with a U.S. government agency.” The company is expecting that its customer evaluation units will be completed by the end of this year with the objective of potentially having OneNav’s technology in end-user devices by late 2022.
Location tracking has become a major area of investment for venture capitalists, with companies working on a variety of technologies outside of GPS to offer additional detail and functionality where GPS falls short. Poizner sees these technologies as ultimately complementary to what he and his team are building at OneNav. “The better the GPS, the less pressure on these augmentation systems,” he said, while acknowledging that, “it is the case though that in certain environments [like downtown Manhattan or underground in a subway], you will never get the GPS to work.”
For Poizner, it’s a bit of a return to entrepreneurship. Prior to starting OneNav, he had been heavily involved in California state politics. Several years after the sale of SnapTrack to Qualcomm, he unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the California State Assembly. He later was elected California’s insurance commissioner in 2007 under former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He ran for governor in 2010, losing in the Republican primary against Meg Whitman, who made her name as the longtime head of eBay. He ran for his former seat of California insurance commissioner in 2018, this time as a political independent, but lost.
OneNav is based in Palo Alto and currently has more than 30 employees.
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Philippine e-commerce enabler Great Deals raises $30M Series B led by logistics firm Fast Group
Steve Sy, CEO of Great Deals, and William Chiongbian II, CEO of Fast Group, sign the contract for the companies’ strategic partnership. Image Credits: Great Deals
Founded in 2014, Great Deals is an e-commerce enabler that helps brands like Abbot, L’Oréal and Unilever build their online retail operations in the Philippines. The startup announced today that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Fast Group, one of the Philippines’ biggest logistics firms, with support from CVC Capital Partners. Navegar, which led Great Deals’ Series A, also returned for this round.
The transaction was advised by Rocket Equities. The investment by Fast Group, which has a fleet of more than 2,500 vehicles and 90,000 stores in its distribution network, marks the beginning of a strategic partnership. Great Deals will use part of the new capital to build an automated fulfillment center, and the deal will help it increase its penetration outside the Greater Manila Area and offer more Instant Commerce, or deliveries under one hour.
Great Deals currently operates only in the Philippines, but plans to expand regionally next year, founder and chief executive officer Steve Sy told TechCrunch.
In a statement, Fast Group president and chief executive officer William Chiongbian II said, “The Fast Group sees a lot of synergies with Great Deals in building capacity. We are privileged to contribute to the growth of Philippine e-commerce, as it relies heavily on a strong supply chain backbone.”
Some of Great Deals’ other clients include Nestlé, Samsonite, GSK, Bayer and Fila. In addition to serving as an e-commerce distributor, it offers an end-to-end services for brands, including digital content production, marketing campaign coordination and management of marketplace listings (Great Deals’ partners include Lazada, Shopee, Zalora, Zilingo, Shopify and Magento).
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Dear Sophie: What’s happening with visa application receipt notices?
Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”
Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.
Dear Sophie,
Our startup employs several individuals who are on work visas or have employment authorization. Many of them have been waiting for quite a while for the government to tell them their applications have been received.
Why? When will things be back on track? We have a few employees who are waiting for green cards, and a few F-1 visa holders who will be extending their OPT to STEM OPT.
Is there anything we can do?
— Patient in Pasadena
Dear Patient,
Thanks for your questions. Last September, an increase in applications submitted to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) amid COVID-19-related staff reductions created a substantial backlog and subsequent delay in USCIS sending out receipt notices.
My law firm partner, Anita Koumriqian, and I provided an update on receipt notices on a recent podcast. Dedicating an entire episode to receipt notices was unthinkable a year ago because applicants usually received receipt notices within one to three weeks after USCIS received their application.
For those who don’t know, USCIS sends a letter called a receipt notice to applicants when it receives an application. The receipt notice — also known as a Notice of Action or Form I-797 — contains information about:
- Whether the application was accepted, in which case you will be notified of how it will be processed, or rejected if it was not filed appropriately, such as not using the latest form or forgetting to check a box on the application form.
- A receipt number, which can be used to check the status of your case either online or by phone.
- The date your application was received, which for most green card applications is the priority date. (Priority dates for the EB-2 and EB-3 green cards are when the Labor Department received the PERM Labor Certification application.) A priority date determines your place in line for a green card number to become available based on the green card category and the green card candidate’s country of birth.
What caused the backlog?
Before the pandemic, applicants would typically be notified in less than one month after USCIS received their application. Currently, applicants are receiving their receipt notice as long as eight to nine weeks after USCIS received their application, and sometimes longer.
As I mentioned earlier, coronavirus-related staffing reductions at USCIS coupled with a substantial jump in the number of applications submitted prompted huge delays that began in September. Application submissions surged primarily due to:
- Anticipation of fee hikes that were slated to go into effect on October 2, 2020, before being blocked by a federal court judge.
- Rapid forward movement in the monthly Visa Bulletin for some green card categories, which meant green card numbers became available to many waiting in line.
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OpenUnit raises a $1M seed round to be the online face of self-storage
How are mom-and-pop self-storage facilities meant to keep up with the tech offered by the massive, ever-growing chains?
That’s a key part of the idea behind OpenUnit, a team I first wrote about in August of last year. You bring the storage units, they bring the website, payment processing and backend tools you need to manage them. They don’t charge facility owners a monthly subscription fee, instead taking a cut of each payment as the payments processor.
OpenUnit has now raised a $1 million seed round, and acquired the IP of a fellow YC company along the way.
Since we last heard from OpenUnit, they’ve been expanding to locations around the U.S. and Canada, and now have a waitlist over 800 facilities deep, the team tells me.
Image Credits: OpenUnit
OpenUnit co-founder Taylor Cooney was quick to point out that this seed round is as much about strategic partnerships as it is about the money. Neither Taylor nor co-founder Lucas Playford had much to do with the storage industry until a knock at the door led them down a rabbit hole. As I wrote back in August:
…Taylor’s landlords came to him with an offer: they wanted to sell the place he was renting, and they’d give him a stack of cash if he could be out within just a few days. Pulling that off meant finding a place to keep all of his stuff while he looked for a new home, which is when he realized how antiquated the self-storage process could be.
Of the 20+ investors participating in the round, six are from the self-storage industry, from prior/current facility owners to the director of the Canadian Self Storage Association. For some of them, it’s their first time investing in a tech or software company — but all potentially bring something to the table beyond money.
Of course, that’s not to say they’re just letting that money sit around. They’ve grown the team from just Taylor and Lucas up to five, and are still looking to grow. Meanwhile, Taylor tells me the company has acquired the IP of fellow Y Combinator W20 batchmate Affiga, a product that aimed to automatically provide insights about a new customer after a transaction is made.
Writes Taylor: “As self-storage companies move services like rentals, leases, and payments online, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to ‘know’ their customers. We see the integration into our product as a way to help self-storage operators bridge the gap between their online and in-store customer experiences, where the personal touch tends to be lost.”
Affiga initially shut down its operations back in 2020. After OpenUnit realized they wanted something similar in their product, they set out to buy rather than build. “With a decade in e-commerce under their belt,” Taylor tells me, “their founder had a much better approach to this then we would’ve come up with.”
So what’s next? Besides getting more people off the waitlist and onto the platform, they’re exploring other opportunities, including potentially providing loans to facilities looking to expand or renovate. Because OpenUnit is both the management platform and the payments provider, they have deep insights on how a facility is doing; they know how much a location makes, how punctual their customers are with payments, etc. Take that data and mash it up with insights on what improvements can increase revenue, and it seems like a pretty straightforward formula.
This round includes investment from Garage Capital, Advisors Fund, Insite Property Group, SquareFoot co-founder Jonathan Wasserstrum, and a number of angel investors.
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Liquid Instruments raises $13.7M to bring its education-focused 8-in-1 engineering gadget to market
Part of learning to be an engineer is understanding the tools you’ll have to work with — voltmeters, spectrum analyzers, things like that. But why use two, or eight for that matter, where one will do? The Moku:Go combines several commonly used tools into one compact package, saving room on your workbench or classroom while also providing a modern, software-configurable interface. Creator Liquid Instruments has just raised $13.7 million to bring this gadget to students and engineers everywhere.
Image Credits: Liquid Instruments
The idea behind Moku:Go is largely the same as the company’s previous product, the Moku:Lab. Using a standard input port, a set of FPGA-based tools perform the same kind of breakdowns and analyses of electrical signals as you would get in a larger or analog device. But being digital saves a lot of space that would normally go toward bulky analog components.
The Go takes this miniaturization further than the Lab, doing many of the same tasks at half the weight and with a few useful extra features. It’s intended for use in education or smaller engineering shops where space is at a premium. Combining eight tools into one is a major coup when your bench is also your desk and your file cabinet.
Those eight tools, by the way, are: waveform generator, arbitrary waveform generator, frequency response analyzer, logic analyzer/pattern generator, oscilloscope/voltmeter, PID controller, spectrum analyzer and data logger. It’s hard to say whether that really adds up to more or less than eight, but it’s definitely a lot to have in a package the size of a hardback book.
You access and configure them using a software interface rather than a bunch of knobs and dials — though let’s be clear, there are good arguments for both. When you’re teaching a bunch of young digital natives, however, a clean point-and-click interface is probably a plus. The UI is actually very attractive; you can see several examples by clicking the instruments on this page, but here’s an example of the waveform generator:
Image Credits: Liquid Instruments
Love those pastels.
The Moku:Go currently works with Macs and Windows but doesn’t have a mobile app yet. It integrates with Python, MATLAB and LabVIEW. Data goes over Wi-Fi.
Compared with the Moku:Lab, it has a few perks. A USB-C port instead of a mini, a magnetic power port, a 16-channel digital I/O, optional power supply of up to four channels and of course it’s half the size and weight. It compromises on a few things — no SD card slot and less bandwidth for its outputs, but if you need the range and precision of the more expensive tool, you probably need a lot of other stuff too.
Image Credits: Liquid Instruments
Since the smaller option also costs $500 to start (“a price comparable to a textbook”… yikes) compared with the big one’s $3,500, there’s major savings involved. And it’s definitely cheaper than buying all those instruments individually.
The Moku:Go is “targeted squarely at university education,” said Liquid Instruments VP of marketing Doug Phillips. “Professors are able to employ the device in the classroom and individuals, such as students and electronic engineering hobbyists, can experiment with it on their own time. Since its launch in March, the most common customer profile has been students purchasing the device at the direction of their university.”
About a hundred professors have signed on to use the device as part of their fall classes, and the company is working with other partners in universities around the world. “There is a real demand for portable, flexible systems that can handle the breadth of four years of curriculum,” Phillips said.
Production starts in June (samples are out to testers), the rigors and costs of which likely prompted the recent round of funding. The $13.7 million comes from existing investors Anzu Partners and ANU Connect Ventures, and new investors F1 Solutions and Moelis Australia’s Growth Capital Fund. It’s a convertible note “in advance of an anticipated Series B round in 2022,” Phillips said. It’s a larger amount than they intended to raise at first, and the note nature of the round is also not standard, but given the difficulties faced by hardware companies over the last year, some irregularities are probably to be expected.
No doubt the expected B round will depend considerably on the success of the Moku:Go’s launch and adoption. But this promising product looks as if it might be a commonplace item in thousands of classrooms a couple years from now.
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Exhibit at TC Disrupt 2021: Snag a Startup Alley Pass before prices go up
The TC Disrupt 2021 super early-bird deal took our best deal in its beak and flew the coop. But you can still buy a Startup Alley Pass and exhibit in our virtual expo area at a great price. Take advantage of our early-bird deal, cross an item off your to-do list and keep $50 in your wallet.
Pro Tip: The early-bird deadline is August 6 at 11:59 p.m. (PT), and if that feels like a long way off, don’t be fooled. It’ll be here before you know it, and Startup Alley Passes are selling faster than ever. Get yours for just $249 while you can.
In addition to your virtual exhibit space and the abundance of networking that goes on in the Alley, we have additional opportunities for exhibitors. For starters, each exhibiting startup gets to participate in a breakout pitch-feedback session.
You’ll have two minutes to pitch live to TechCrunch staff and thousands of Disrupt attendees around the world. And you’ll receive plenty of great feedback to improve your pitch deck.
“I walked away with a bunch of notes to reorganize my pitch deck. It’s a lot of work, but it’s very rewarding because now I have a clear path. Disrupt was like an authoritative instruction manual for how to finish my pitch deck.” — Michael McCarthy, CEO, Repositax.
Note: The TechCrunch Editorial team will choose two outstanding exhibiting startups to be Startup Battlefield Wild Cards. Those founders will get to compete for the $100,000 (equity-free) cash and massive exposure in the Startup Battlefield. It. Could. Be. You.
Team TechCrunch will also host a series of Startup Alley Crawls — one hour for each business category. Editors will go live on the Disrupt stage and interview various founders exhibiting in Startup Alley. It’s great global exposure.
Here’s another big reason to get your exhibitor pass sooner rather than later. It’s a new opportunity called Startup Alley+ and you must purchase a Startup Alley Pass before Friday, June 4 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) to be eligible for this VIP Disrupt experience. TechCrunch will choose up to 50 startups to participate. Read about all the perks and benefits here. Get your pass before the deadline, because the Startup Alley+ experience kicks off in July at Early Stage 2021 — Marketing and Fundraising.
So many great reasons to exhibit in Startup Alley at TC Disrupt 2021, but the clock is ticking on early-bird savings. Take one simple task off your overloaded to-do list, buy your Startup Alley Pass now — while it’s on your mind — and save yourself $50 bucks.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
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