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Startups at the speed of light: Lidar CEOs put their industry in perspective
Our science and AI correspondent Devin Coldewey has a blockbuster look at the current state of affairs in the lidar industry. What started as those gyrating “spinners” on top of partially autonomous cars has evolved into a variety of mechanisms like metameterials, all the while VCs have dumped hundreds of millions of dollars on to new ventures.
The big challenge today though is to move from curios in the lab to production-ready hardware prepared for the open road. While some startups have netted early partnerships with car manufacturers like BMW, nothing is set in stone yet, even as a consolidation of the industry seems absolutely imminent.
There’s no shortage of lidar alternatives — as long as you don’t need something that’s ready to roll off the production line.
“Almost everything is in R&D, of which 95 percent is in the earlier stages of research, rather than actual development,” explained Austin Russell, founder and CEO of Luminar. “The development stage is a huge undertaking — to actually move it towards real-world adoption and into true series production vehicles. Whoever is able to enable true autonomy in production vehicles first is going to be the game changer for the industry. But that hasn’t happened yet.”
And
“I’ve been approached at least four times in the last two months with an offer to buy a lidar company,” said Innoviz CEO Omer Keilaf. “It doesn’t surprise me to see some convergence. While there are 20 or 30 car makers, only a few are early adopters — companies like BMW, Daimler, Audi — and they’re built in a way to do that. They have dedicated teams for working with companies like us, making sure everything goes right in such a complicated project. And that trend is even stronger when it’s related to functional safety.”
The rise of the new crypto “mafias”
Accomplice’s lead crypto investor Ash Egan offered up his research onto the crypto world, tracking the lineage of almost 200 startups to determine where they all started. His conclusion is that a handful of institutions — among them Stanford, Google, and Goldman Sachs — lead the pack as the best academies for crypto startup founders.
Of the four early-forming crypto mafias, Coinbase, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, and Stanford are the top destinations (within their respective categories) if you’re looking to start a crypto company. The combined spinouts from these four totaled 54 spinouts, or 29% of the 186 spinouts counted.
Academia produced more spinouts than Crypto, Tech, and Wall Street since 2009, which makes sense given the sheer size of universities combined with multi-disciplinary roots on campus (home to professors, business school students, computer science, etc.).
How startups can make influencer marketing work on a budget
Influencer marketing has probably been the most discussed new marketing strategy in the past decade, but despite the incredible attention heaped on Instagram celebrities and their ilk, figuring out effectiveness and marketing efficiency remains challenging.
Ishveen Anand, the CEO and founder of OpenSponsorship, discusses how startups can take advantage of some of the arbitrage potential in the influencer category.
On OpenSponsorship, 40% of our deals involve just product exchange, with another 40% in the $500 – $5K range and the final 20% being on average $20K.
Three questions arise when it comes to price:
1. What is the total budget for the campaign?
2. How do you want to break this budget down among the influencers?
3. Will the objective of the campaign be achieved with this breakdown?
Shuttl is winning over office workers in India with safer bus commute option
As ridehailing and other innovative new transportation models expand globally, entrepreneurs are taking the now standard formulas and configuring them for their local market.
Our India tech correspondent Manish Singh explores one of these new offerings, Shuttl. Shuttl “operates over 1,300 buses in more than 300 routes in five cities of India. The platform serves more than 65,000 customers each day.” Many of those passengers are women, a feat that required deep product work but is now appearing to pay off in spades:
More than 40% of Shuttl’s passengers are female, who find the rides on its buses a safer commute option. This is a promising feat, as women only make up for 20% of India’s workforce, according to industry estimates. Part of this has to do with investment Shuttl has made in building safety systems on its platform.
In 2017, Shuttl integrated a dozen emergency features on its platform. One feature allowed passengers to ring the alarm or panic button, either of which automatically slows down the bus until stopping it completely at the nearest bus stop. It also added a live video feed that any passenger could share with their loved ones.
Another mandatory feature requires drivers to identify themselves before starting the journey and take an instant alcohol test. Passengers, who are required to book a ticket in advance of riding the bus — different from how traditional buses operate in India — are also authenticated before they can get on with their rides.
Assistive technologies will be a $26 billion dollar market, and investors are only now addressing it
TechCrunch senior editor Jon Shieber meanwhile takes a look at the underfunded but gargantuan assistive technologies industry. After many years of neglect, startups and some VCs have turned their attention to the space, creating new products that can improve the ability of people to interact with hardware and digital services.
There are 12 million people in the UK living with a disability, Rohan Silva says. The entire population of people with disabilities globally stands at 1 billion and there are 70 million potential customers for assistive technology products across Europe. If demand in human terms isn’t enough to sway would-be entrepreneurs, then perhaps a recent market report indicating that spending on assistive technologies for the elderly and people with disabilities is projected to reach over $26 billion by 2024 will do the trick.
“It’s a big market, and yet, basically very few startups are being founded in that area and very little money is being invested,” Silva says. “It’s a vicious cycle downward. If [entrepreneurs] know venture capitalists aren’t interested and they can’t really raise money in that area … they don’t really develop a new orthotic brace, they do another photo-sharing app.”
Videos lead brand creative growth with 3x increase since 2017
The proliferation of marketing channels, from YouTube to Instagram, has led to enormous demand for advertisers to constantly offer fresh media to meet the demands of their audiences. But marketing budgets can’t keep up with those demands.
James Winter, the VP of Marketing at Brandfolder, investigates how to navigate these churning waters, looking at the half-life of a new brand asset (think a viral video on Instagram) and how a modern marketing department should think about creatives.
But, what does asset shelf life really mean? Asset shelf life is defined as the number of days between when an asset was created and its latest event date (the last time it was accessed, viewed, downloaded, distributed, etc.). An asset is just like a living, breathing creature. It moves from creation through purpose and finally reaches retirement or its, sometimes timely, archival.
Not all assets are created equal, however. With the creation of AI & ML technologies, brands are getting smarter about their content’s performance. High-performing brands are quicker to remove underperforming content from their arsenal and generate new brand creative to keep things fresh.
And with video on the rise, that also takes a big chunk of change out of marketing and creative budgets. Thankfully, but not ironically, we’re seeing that the asset types that take a larger investment also have longer shelf lives.
Thanks
To every member of Extra Crunch: thank you. You allow us to get off the ad-laden media churn conveyor belt and spend quality time on amazing ideas, people, and companies. If I can ever be of assistance, hit reply, or send an email to danny@techcrunch.com.