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Win $100,000: Apply to Startup Battlefield at TC Disrupt 2021
You’ve been hard at work building your game-changing startup. Diligent in its care and feeding so that, one day soon, it will grow into the mighty unicorn you envision. If you fit that description, we want you to apply to compete in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23.
Any early-stage startup founder with an MVP — regardless of your category or geographic location — is eligible to apply. But here’s the thing. The window for tossing your hat into the ring is shrinking rapidly. Don’t wait — apply to compete in Startup Battlefield before the window slams shut on May 27 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).
Let’s run down the list of many benefits that come from competing in the world’s most famous startup launching pad.
Perfect pitch: All competing startups get weeks of free training with the TC Startup Battlefield training squad. You’ll hone your presentations skills, polish your business model and pitch with cool, calm confidence come game day.
Global exposure: An all-virtual Startup Battlefield means that thousands upon thousands of startup influencers, icons, tech media, potential investors, customers, collaborators and developers around the world will tune in to watch this always-epic event. All competitors — win or lose — bask in, and benefit from, this global, equal-opportunity spotlight.
Plenty of perks: Battlefield gladiators are TC Disrupt VIPs. You’ll enjoy lots of complimentary bennies, including exhibition space in virtual Startup Alley, event passes, tickets to future TC events, a private reception with members of the Startup Battlefield alumni community, access to the CrunchMatch networking platform and a free subscription to Extra Crunch.
Mucho moola: One startup will rise above the rest to claim the Disrupt Cup, the title of Startup Battlefield Champion and the $100,000 of equity-free prize money. Ka-ching.
Of course, you’ll make your pitch to, and then answer questions from, panels of expert judges. Who are these mystical beings you need to impress? So far, we’ve announced two, with plenty more to come. We’re thrilled to have both Alexa von Tobel, co-founder and managing partner of Inspired Capital, and Terri Burns, a partner at GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) on board.
Remember those influencers and potential investors we mentioned earlier? We’re talking about folks like Rachael Wilcox, a creative producer at Volvo Cars. Rachel told us that she goes to TechCrunch events to “find new and interesting companies, make new business connections and look for startups with investment potential.” She also shared her thoughts about Startup Battlefield.
“The Startup Battlefield translated easily to the virtual format. You could see the excitement, enthusiasm and possibility of the young founders, and I loved that. You could also ask questions through the chat feature, and you don’t always have time for questions at a live event.”
Your unicorn dreams might be on an early-stage startup budget, but this is a huge opportunity for you to gain global exposure and have a good shot at winning $100,000. Apply to compete in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23. Don’t wait — we stop accepting applications on May 27 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).
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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Benchmark Space Systems and Starfish Space team up to advance orbital docking and refueling
Humans may not have totally mastered getting objects to space, but we’ve done a pretty good job so far. The hundreds of satellites that orbit the Earth are proof enough that “send stuff to space” is firmly in humanity’s capacity. But what about refueling, repairing or even adding capabilities to spacecraft or satellites once they’re up there?
In the past few years, a host of companies have started to turn what has long been seen as a pipe dream into a real possibility. Now, satellite servicing company Starfish Space and space mobility provider Benchmark Space Systems will be entering into a new partnership aimed at advancing these much-needed capabilities — and their first demonstration will take place next month, on space startup Orbit Fab’s Tanker 1 mission.
Orbit Fab, which was a finalist in our TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in 2019, will be sending up an operational fuel depot on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in June. The tanker is the first of what Orbit Fab is envisioning as a “gas station in space” — in-orbit propellant available to satellite customers that will no longer be limited in terms of their spacecraft’s active life by the amount of fuel they take up on launch.
Benchmark Space Systems and Orbit Fab already have an agreement to combine Benchmark’s Halcyon thruster system and the fuel depot startup’s fluid transfer interface (imagine a refueling apparatus) into an integrated propulsion package.
This is where Starfish Space comes in. It will be testing its CEPHALOPOD rendezvous proximity operations and docking (RPOD) software with Benchmark’s Halcyon thruster system to make sure that the refueling demonstration is as accurate as possible. The RPOD software is entirely autonomous and can give small servicing vehicles up to eight times more maneuvering capability, the company says.
Demonstration missions like the one in June are just the beginning. Refueling capacity could not only extend the mission length of satellites and other spacecraft, it could help open the door to new types of space missions and the emerging space economy.
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Finary wants to create the wealth management dashboard for the next generation
Meet Finary, a new French startup that wants to change how you manage your savings, investments, mortgage, real estate assets and cryptocurrencies. The company lets you aggregate all your accounts across various banks and financial institutions so you can track your wealth comprehensively over time.
After attending Y Combinator, the startup has just closed a $2.7 million (€2.2 million) seed round led by Speedinvest, with Kima Ventures and angel investors such as Raphaël Vullierme also participating.
If you know people who have a ton of money, chances are they tend to be at least 40 or 50 years old — you don’t become rich overnight, after all. And they tend to manage their investment portfolio through a wealth management service with tailor-made services.
“There’s very little tech in wealth management. Advisors are also incentivized to sell you some financial products in particular,” co-founder and CEO Mounir Laggoune told me. In that situation, the company in charge of the financial product is generating revenue for the advisor — not the client.
At the same time, a new generation of investors is starting to accumulate a lot of wealth. And yet, they don’t have the right tools to allocate it properly. Younger people want to see information directly. They want a way to track information in real time, or near real time. And they want to be able to take some actions based on that data.
Finary wants to build that service based on those principles. It starts with an API-based aggregator. When you create a Finary account, you can connect it with all your other accounts — bank accounts, brokerage accounts, mortgage and real estate, gold, cryptocurrencies, etc.
The startup leverages various open banking APIs to be as exhaustive as possible. For instance, “you can connect a Robinhood account and a Crédit Mutuel de Bretagne account,” Laggoune said. Behind the scenes, Finary uses Plaid and Budget Insight, runs its own bitcoin and Ethereum nodes to track wallet addresses, and estimates the value of your home through public data and a proprietary algorithm.
After that, you can see how much money you have, how it is divided between your investment pools, the current value of your gold and cryptocurrency assets and more.
“Our long-term vision is that we want to build a virtual wealth manager for Europe,” Laggoune said.
That’s why Finary recently launched its premium subscription called Finary+. With a premium account, you can see how much you’re paying in fees and track your performance — more features will get added over time.
A few months after launching its platform, Finary already tracks €2 billion in assets across thousands of users. With today’s funding round, the startup will roll out its service to more countries and more financial institutions in France, Europe and the U.S. The company is also working on mobile apps.
This is an interesting take on wealth management, as Finary doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. Legacy players want you to use a single bank for all your financial needs. But you end up paying a lot of fees and you have to use old and clunky interfaces.
Finary isn’t yet another wealth management service. It’s a holistic service that lets you use multiple banks and services while remaining on top of your assets.
Image Credits: Finary
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Aevum is building a modular autonomous drone for space and terrestrial deliveries
Logistics and delivery providers are territorially split between Earth and space, with companies like Amazon and FedEx working to master ground, air and drone transportation, and new entrants like SpaceX honing its expertise in space launch.
Autonomous transportation startup Aevum wants to do both. And it was just issued a patent that will help it move dexterously between space launch to low Earth orbit, and air cargo and drone deliveries here on Earth.
The key is Aevum’s unmanned aircraft system, which it calls Ravn X. So far, Aevum has only publicly discussed its plans for Ravn X in the context of space launches. It works like this: Ravn X uses conventional jet fuel and takes off from an airport runway, like a plane, but it has a rocket nested in its belly that deploys at high altitude to deliver payload to space. As the second stage detaches, Ravn X returns to Earth using conventional touch-down techniques, ready for another delivery.
The new Aevum patent, which was issued on May 4, is for a unique modular payload design positioned in the belly of the drone. With the new system described in the patent, that rocket payload module can be switched out for a cargo bay to carry deliveries around the world, or a drone module that can carry up to 264 smaller drones for last-mile delivery services. Theoretically, Ravn X could depart from an airport, deliver its payload to space, return back to the airport to be reloaded with a filled cargo module, then take off again for earthbound deliveries.
While the exact amount a Ravn X can carry depends on the distance it’s traveling, the Ravn X air cargo will be able to carry up to 15,000 lbs and the space delivery payload will be able to carry up to 330 lbs. As of now, the rockets are expendable, but the company has plans for 100% reusability across its space launch and air cargo operations.
Aevum’s business model includes operating autonomous transportation and logistics as a service and partnering with existing logistics providers. One interesting possibility for the company is partnerships with logistics giants that so far have been effectively cut off from space deliveries due to the vertically integrated models of companies like SpaceX, which handle logistics and launch services in-house.
“We aim to enable FedEx, Amazon, UPS, DHL and others to build upon the logistics infrastructure they have already mastered,” Aevum CEO Jay Skylus said. “Any or all of these respected giants could partner with Aevum or purchase a fleet of Ravn X for their own and add space launch to their offerings. Space logistics should no longer be separated from general logistics.”
Aevum founder and CEO Jay Skylus with Ravn X. Image Credits: Aevum
Likewise, large companies that have struggled to establish drone delivery services could use the Ravn X’s drone module to deliver and deposit drones over a central area, like a city center, for last-mile deliveries.
“The patent is so significant because what the patent allows you to do is say — the existing FedEx and UPS logistics architecture that’s sorting 70,000 packages an hour right now could not service the needs of defense and space because fundamentally that logistics infrastructure was designed to go from Earth to Earth and not Earth to space,” Skylus explained. “But if you really look at the problem and study it in detail, you know the missing link to allow this existing infrastructure to now be able to service the space domain — that missing link is what we just patented.”
Skylus imagines Ravn X fleets operating around-the-clock. “In my company, what matters is asset utilization. For any reusable flying machine, it doesn’t generate revenue on the ground. My machines will fly around the clock, every day,” he said in a statement.
The company still has a ways to go before it takes to the skies, however. Ravn X is still undergoing ground test operations and will begin flight testing this year at an FAA-licensed testing facility for unmanned aircraft systems. Aevum’s intention is to fly with the United States Air Force’s ASLON-45 mission this fall and to take its air cargo service live next year.
Because Ravn X has so many different capabilities, it will need to pursue a few different FAA certifications: for space launches, a license from the FAA Commercial Space Transportation office; for cargo operations, an FAA aircraft type certification and standard airworthiness certification.
“What we’ve patented is the next layer and large batch of connections in the global logistics infrastructure,” Skylus said. “Space logistics shouldn’t be separated from logistics that already exist.”
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Explorium scores $75M Series C just 10 months after B round
Without good data, it’s impossible to build an accurate predictive machine learning model. Explorium, a company that has been building a solution over the last several years to help data pros find the best data for a given model, announced a $75 million Series C today — just 10 months after announcing a $31 million Series B.
Insight Partners led today’s investment with participation from existing investors Zeev Ventures, Emerge, F2 Venture Capital, 01 Advisors and Dynamic Loop Capital. The company reports it has now raised a total of $127 million. George Mathew, managing partner at Insight, and former president and COO at Alteryx, will be joining the board, giving the company someone with solid operator experience to help guide them into the next phase.
Company co-founder and CEO Maor Shlomo, says that in spite of how horrible COVID has been from a human perspective, it has been a business accelerator for his company and he saw revenue quadruple last year (although he didn’t share specific numbers beyond that). “It’s related to the nature of our business. We’re helping enterprises and data practitioners find new data sources that can help them solve business challenges,” Sholmo explained.
He says that during the pandemic, a lot of companies had to find new data sources because the old data wasn’t especially helpful for predictive models. That meant that customers required new sources to give them visibility into the shifts and movements in the market to help them adjust and make decisions during pandemic. “And given that’s basically what our platform does in its essence, we’ve seen a lot of growth [over the past year],” he says.
With the revenue growth the company has been experiencing, it has been adding employees at rapid clip. When we spoke to Explorium last July, the company had 87 people. Today that number has grown to 130 with plans to get to 200 perhaps by the end of 2021 or early 2022, depending on how the business continues to grow.
The company has offices in Tel Aviv and San Mateo, California with plans to open a new office in New York City whenever it’s possible to do so. While Shlomo wants a flexible workplace, he’s not going fully remote with plans to allow people to work two days from home and three in the office as local rules allow.
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Artificial raises $21M led by Microsoft’s M12 for a lab automation platform aimed at life sciences R&D
Automation is extending into every aspect of how organizations get work done, and today comes news of a startup that is building tools for one industry in particular: life sciences. Artificial, which has built a software platform for laboratories to assist with, or in some cases fully automate, research and development work, has raised $21.5 million.
It plans to use the funding to continue building out its software and its capabilities, to hire more people, and for business development, according to Artificial’s CEO and co-founder David Fuller. The company already has a number of customers including Thermo Fisher and Beam Therapeutics using its software directly and in partnership for their own customers. Sold as aLab Suite, Artificial’s technology can both orchestrate and manage robotic machines that labs might be using to handle some work; and help assist scientists when they are carrying out the work themselves.
“The basic premise of what we’re trying to do is accelerate the rate of discovery in labs,” Fuller said in an interview. He believes the process of bringing in more AI into labs to improve how they work is long overdue. “We need to have a digital revolution to change the way that labs have been operating for the last 20 years.”
The Series A is being led by Microsoft’s venture fund M12 — a financial and strategic investor — with Playground Global and AME Cloud Ventures also participating. Playground Global, the VC firm co-founded by ex-Google exec and Android co-creator Andy Rubin (who is no longer with the firm), has been focusing on robotics and life sciences and it led Artificial’s first and only other round. Artificial is not disclosing its valuation with this round.
Fuller hails from a background in robotics, specifically industrial robots and automation. Before founding Artificial in 2019, he was at Kuka, the German robotics maker, for a number of years, culminating in the role of CTO; prior to that, Fuller spent 20 years at National Instruments, the instrumentation, test equipment and industrial software giant. Meanwhile, Artificial’s co-founder, Nikhita Singh, has insight into how to bring the advances of robotics into environments that are quite analogue in culture. She previously worked on human-robot interaction research at the MIT Media Lab, and before that spent years at Palantir and working on robotics at Berkeley.
As Fuller describes it, he saw an interesting gap (and opportunity) in the market to apply automation, which he had seen help advance work in industrial settings, to the world of life sciences, both to help scientists track what they are doing better, and help them carry out some of the more repetitive work that they have to do day in, day out.
This gap is perhaps more in the spotlight today than ever before, given the fact that we are in the middle of a global health pandemic. This has hindered a lot of labs from being able to operate full in-person teams, and increased the reliance on systems that can crunch numbers and carry out work without as many people present. And, of course, the need for that work (whether it’s related directly to Covid-19 or not) has perhaps never appeared as urgent as it does right now.
There have been a lot of advances in robotics — specifically around hardware like robotic arms — to manage some of the precision needed to carry out some work, but up to now no real efforts made at building platforms to bring all of the work done by that hardware together (or in the words of automation specialists, “orchestrate” that work and data); nor link up the data from those robot-led efforts, with the work that human scientists still carry out. Artificial estimates that some $10 billion is spent annually on lab informatics and automation software, yet data models to unify that work, and platforms to reach across it all, remain absent. That has, in effect, served as a barrier to labs modernising as much as they could.
A lab, as he describes it, is essentially composed of high-end instrumentation for analytics, alongside then robotic systems for liquid handling. “You can really think of a lab, frankly, as a kitchen,” he said, “and the primary operation in that lab is mixing liquids.”
But it is also not unlike a factory, too. As those liquids are mixed, a robotic system typically moves around pipettes, liquids, in and out of plates and mixes. “There’s a key aspect of material flow through the lab, and the material flow part of it is much more like classic robotics,” he said. In other words, there is, as he says, “a combination of bespoke scientific equipment that includes automation, and then classic material flow, which is much more standard robotics,” and is what makes the lab ripe as an applied environment for automation software.
To note: the idea is not to remove humans altogether, but to provide assistance so that they can do their jobs better. He points out that even the automotive industry, which has been automated for 50 years, still has about 6% of all work done by humans. If that is a watermark, it sounds like there is a lot of movement left in labs: Fuller estimates that some 60% of all work in the lab is done by humans. And part of the reason for that is simply because it’s just too complex to replace scientists — who he described as “artists” — altogether (for now at least).
“Our solution augments the human activity and automates the standard activity,” he said. “We view that as a central thesis that differentiates us from classic automation.”
There have been a number of other startups emerging that are applying some of the learnings of artificial intelligence and big data analytics for enterprises to the world of science. They include the likes of Turing, which is applying this to helping automate lab work for CPG companies; and Paige, which is focusing on AI to help better understand cancer and other pathology.
The Microsoft connection is one that could well play out in how Artificial’s platform develops going forward, not just in how data is perhaps handled in the cloud, but also on the ground, specifically with augmented reality.
“We see massive technical synergy,” Fuller said. “When you are in a lab you already have to wear glasses… and we think this has the earmarks of a long-term use case.”
Fuller mentioned that one area it’s looking at would involve equipping scientists and other technicians with Microsoft’s HoloLens to help direct them around the labs, and to make sure people are carrying out work consistently by comparing what is happening in the physical world to a “digital twin” of a lab containing data about supplies, where they are located, and what needs to happen next.
It’s this and all of the other areas that have yet to be brought into our very AI-led enterprise future that interested Microsoft.
“Biology labs today are light- to semi-automated—the same state they were in when I started my academic research and biopharmaceutical career over 20 years ago. Most labs operate more like test kitchens rather than factories,” said Dr. Kouki Harasaki, an investor at M12, in a statement. “Artificial’s aLab Suite is especially exciting to us because it is uniquely positioned to automate the masses: it’s accessible, low code, easy to use, highly configurable, and interoperable with common lab hardware and software. Most importantly, it enables Biopharma and SynBio labs to achieve the crowning glory of workflow automation: flexibility at scale.”
Harasaki is joining Peter Barratt, a founder and general partner at Playground Global, on Artificial’s board with this round.
“It’s become even more clear as we continue to battle the pandemic that we need to take a scalable, reproducible approach to running our labs, rather than the artisanal, error-prone methods we employ today,” Barrett said in a statement. “The aLab Suite that Artificial has pioneered will allow us to accelerate the breakthrough treatments of tomorrow and ensure our best and brightest scientists are working on challenging problems, not manual labor.”
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Bosta raises $6.7M to expand e-commerce delivery business across Africa and MENA
Per a recent report by Bain & Co., e-commerce is expected to grow to $28.5 billion in MENA by 2022 from a 2019 value of $8.3 billion. Egypt, one of the most active e-commerce countries in the region, is anticipated to grow 33% annually to reach $3 billion by 2022.
But for any e-commerce business to thrive, its last-mile delivery arm has to be well figured out. Bosta is one such company in Egypt helping small businesses with logistics and last-mile delivery. Today, the company is announcing it has closed a Series A investment of $6.7 million. U.S. and Middle East VC firm Silicon Badia led the round, with participation from 4DX Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Wealth Well VC, Khwarizmi VC, as well as other regional and global investors.
This investment comes a year after the company raised a $2.5 million round, which takes its total investment raised to $9.2 million.
Bosta was launched in 2017 by Mohamed Ezzat and Ahmed Gaber. The company offers next-day delivery to customers and handles exchange shipments, customer returns and cash collection.
The idea for Bosta came during Ezzat’s time at Lynks, his previous consumer goods startup. Lynks, the first YC-backed company from Egypt, allows people in Egypt to buy brands from the U.S., China and the U.K.
As co-founder and COO at Lynks, Ezzat was responsible for logistics, international clearance and last-mile delivery. In 2016, Egypt experienced an economic downturn coupled with the Egyptian pound devaluation and government restriction on imports. For Lynks it meant slow growth, but Ezzat was concerned about fixing the last-mile delivery bit, which, according to him, was a huge pain point.
“My nightmare was always the last mile. And at that time, you know that e-commerce is still very, very small. So it’s only 1% of the whole retail value,” he told TechCrunch. “So I was always thinking, how come if we want the e-commerce to grow, and we don’t have any strong company when it comes to last-mile because, in the end, every transaction on an e-commerce platform is a transaction on a courier platform.”
E-commerce is a fragmented sector where 80% of transactions come from small businesses selling on Facebook, Instagram and social media in general. Most of these businesses lack a strong delivery experience, and Ezzat left Lynks the following year to start Bosta.
Being in the parcel delivery industry, Bosta wants to help these companies to grow profitably. It also tries to simplify logistics and allow its customers to have full control over the delivery process.
“You can use Bosta to get anything to your doorstep. You buy in our local currency, and we buy everything, handle the shipping, customs, clearance and bring it to your doorstep,” the CEO added.
The company doesn’t own fleets of vehicles to carry out operations. Instead, it operates an Uber-like model where drivers sign up, are made contractors and make money when a delivery is completed.
Since 2017, the company has delivered more than 4 million packages to businesses, more than half since the pandemic outbreak last year. Bosta completes more than 300,000 deliveries per month, which is a 3.5x increase from when it raised its previous round, Ezzat stated. He also claims that more than 2,200 businesses use its platform daily and achieve a 95% delivery success rate.
Asides from small businesses, Bosta works with major e-commerce platforms like Souq (an Amazon company) and Jumia. Depending on the volume of goods transported, Bosta charges small businesses about 35-40 Egyptian pounds, while the big players are charged less, at 20-25 Egyptian pounds.
Speaking on the investment, Fawaz H Zu’bi said in a statement: “E-commerce has always had amazing potential in our region but was always being held back by something whether payments, logistics, market fragmentation, or customer adoption. We are excited to finally see companies like Bosta emerge to tackle some of these issues and help e-commerce realize its full promise and potential in a region that has now ‘turned on’ digitally.”
In the next two years, Bosta plans to deliver more than 15 million parcels in Egypt and serve over 20,000 businesses. The funds will be used for those causes, as well as expanding operations across Africa, MENA and the GCC.
“The investment is to dominate Egypt,” said Ezzat. “We want to make sure that we deliver the next day across Egypt, not just in Cairo, where we currently do. And to be a market leader when it comes to e-commerce on the continent and be profitable. This is the main target for us now and also to start operations in Saudi Arabia.”
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Should startups build or buy telehealth infrastructure?
Digital health in the U.S. got a huge boost from COVID-19 as more people started consulting physicians and urgent care providers remotely in the midst of lockdowns. So much so that McKinsey estimates that up to $250 billion of the current healthcare expenditure in the U.S. has the potential to be spent virtually. The prominence of digital health is undoubtedly here to stay, but how it looks and feels from provider to provider is still a debate among sector startups.
But for providers who want to deliver care virtually across the country, it’s not as simple as adding a Zoom invite to an annual check-up. The process requires intention every step of the way — right from the clinicians delivering remote care to the choice of payment processor.
Providers and healthcare startups can choose white-label solutions such as publicly-listed Teladoc and Truepill, which have been around for a long time, and have powered the operations of unicorns like Hims and Hers, Nurx, and GoodRx as they look to scale in a compliant but efficient manner.
Turnkey solutions might be tempting to companies looking to take advantage of this opportunity, but startups still have to decide what to outsource and what to build. Should you rely on others for staffing your practice? Do you build your own payment processing service in-house? Do you integrate with Zoom or build your own video-conferencing software? These questions are crucial to think about early on to prepare for future scale regardless of whether a startup is B2B or B2C.
More than just Zoom
SteadyMD, which in March raised a $25 million Series B led by Lux Capital, wants to be the infrastructure layer that makes it easier for other companies to offer telehealth services. It is hoping to address a pain point it ran into years earlier: The complexity of launching compliant telehealth services in all 50 states.
The company launched in 2016 with the intent to provide high-quality, virtual primary care for brick-and-mortar shops. Through that process, SteadyMD built a suite of tools to make it work with EMR integrations, doctor-patient communication channels, digital recruiting and forecasting software, and prescription referrals and operations. The burdensome process struck a chord with the co-founders and they pivoted the company to where it is today: an “AWS for healthcare”.
SteadyMD offers a suite of services to its customers, the least of which, says co-founder Guy Friedman, is its video-conferencing platform.
“It’s not about the technology capacities,” Friedman says. “The very large companies that have a lot of resources are using us to help them increase their capacity as workforce.”
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Hardware hacker brings online multiplayer to the original Game Boy
Move over, Xbox and PlayStation. A new foe has appeared in the world of online multiplayer gaming! It’s the… uh, Game Boy. As in that unbreakable, gray, 4.19Mhz tank from 1989.
While the Game Boy has had a handful of locally multiplayer games since the beginning, using it meant physically connecting your Game Boy to another Game Boy via an accessory called the link cable. If you wanted to play some Nintendo with someone further than a few feet away… well, you’d just have to wait a few decades.
In a wildly impressive display of skill, hardware hacker stacksmashing has managed to reverse-engineer the Game Boy’s link cable protocol and effectively trick it into working across the internet. The Game Boy connects through the link cable hooked into a Raspberry Pi to a custom desktop client, which in turn pings an online game server that acts as the bridge between you and your opponent(s). The Game Boy thinks it’s talking to any other ol’ Game Boy, unaware of the fact that it’s actually communicating with a server that could be halfway around the world.
The first game they’ve got working? Tetris!
Getting any given game to work (imagine trading a Pokémon you caught in 1998 with someone across the internet!) will require that game’s unique communication protocols to be reverse-engineered, so it’s only Tetris for now. Fortunately, stacksmashing has opened up the source code for all the various components that have been built so far, so there’s something of a foundation to build upon. And because the whole thing is no fun without anyone to play with, there’s also a Discord channel just for finding others who’ve gone down this rabbit hole. There’s even a custom PCB in the works ($15, with preorders expected to ship by June) that’ll handle the connection between the link cable and the Raspberry Pi, removing the need for you to shred a link cable to expose its wires and make this work.
Stacksmashing also recently made headlines by cracking open and modifying Apple’s AirTags, as well as turning the Game Boy into a (hilariously underpowered) Bitcoin miner.
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Industrial automation startup Bright Machines hauls in $435M by going public via SPAC
Bright Machines is going public via a SPAC-led combination, it announced this morning. The transaction will see the 3-year-old company merge with SCVX, raising gross cash proceeds of $435 million in the process.
After the transaction is consummated, the startup will sport an anticipated equity valuation of $1.6 billion.
The Bright Machines news indicates that the great SPAC chill was not a deep freeze. And the transaction itself, in conjunction with the previously announced Desktop Metal blank-check deal, implies that there is space in the market for hardware startup liquidity via SPACs. Perhaps that will unlock more late-stage capital for hardware-focused upstarts.
Today we’re first looking at what Bright Machines does, and then the financial details that it shared as part of its news.
What’s Bright Machines?
Bright Machines is trying to solve a hard problem related to industrial automation by creating microfactories. This involves a complex mix of hardware, software and artificial intelligence. While robotics has been around in one form or another since the 1970s, for the most part, it has lacked real intelligence. Bright Machines wants to change that.
The company emerged in 2018 with a $179 million Series A, a hefty amount of cash for a young startup, but the company has a bold vision and such a vision takes extensive funding. What it’s trying to do is completely transform manufacturing using machine learning.
At the time of that funding, the company brought in former Autodesk co-CEO Amar Hanspal as CEO and former Autodesk founder and CEO Carl Bass to sit on the company board of directors. AutoDesk itself has been trying to transform design and manufacturing in recent years, so it was logical to bring these two experienced leaders into the fold.
The startup’s thesis is that instead of having what are essentially “unintelligent” robots, it wants to add computer vision and a heavy dose of sensors to bring a data-driven automation approach to the factory floor.
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