Lyft lays off 13% of workforce as it tries to slash operating expenses

Lyft said Thursday it is laying off 13% of its workforce as it tries to reduce operating expenses, according to a securities filing.

The ride-hailing company described the cuts as proactive step to ensure it “is set up to accelerate execution and deliver strong business results in Q4 of 2022 and in 2023.”

Lyft also reiterated Thursday it is sticking with its previously stated guidance on third quarter 2022 revenues, contribution margin and adjusted EBITDA. It has targeted $1 billion in Adjusted EBITDA with more than $700 million in free cash flow for 2024.

Lyft said terminating these 683 employees will cost between $27 million to $32 million in severance and benefits. The company said it expects to record a stock-based compensation charge and payroll tax expense related to restructuring in the fourth quarter and the first quarter of 2023.

The notice comes a few months after Lyft established a hiring freeze, laid off about 60 people and dropped its in-house car rental service. The hiring freeze, which went into effect in August, affects all departments in the U.S. and is expected to last into next year as the ride-hail giant continues to face economic unpredictability.

Lyft  slow hiring in May in order to bring down costs and drive profitability as its stock continues to take a hit. Lyft’s share price has sunk more than 73% since the start of the year at the time of this writing.

Lyft  is scheduled to report its third quarter 2022 financial results November 7.

Lyft lays off 13% of workforce as it tries to slash operating expenses by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

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StretchSense built an actually comfortable hand-motion capture glove

New Zealand-based StretchSense, a maker of hand motion capture technology, believes virtual and augmented reality are going to replace the smartphone as the dominant way we interact with digital worlds and each other. And when that happens, we’ll need natural ways be immersed in those spaces, which means being able to touch and control virtual stuff with your hands.

The startup has built a glove that captures the intricate motions of human hands, along with the software that then translates those movements into an animation. Currently, StretchSense’s tech is used by more than 200 gaming and visual effects studios worldwide to create realistic hand gestures for everything from sign language videos to cinematic fight scenes to virtual health and safety training. In fact, it was recently used to make Snoop Dogg’s ‘Crip Ya Enthusiasm‘ music video. Benjamin O’Brien, co-founder and CEO of StretchSense, told TechCrunch he thinks StretchSense can “be the future of human machine interface for virtual worlds by building garments, not devices.”

StretchSenses’s glove is made using the startup’s proprietary stretchable sensor technology that precisely measures the human form. Before it’s been sewn into the glove, the stretchy material looks and feels like elastic rubber with some light black lines running through. Those black lines are referred to as a stretchable capacitor — a capacitor is the same type of sensor used on the screens of smartphones to measure the amount of energy the screen is storing based on where you put your finger down, which is how it works out what you’re touching. In StretchSense’s case, when the material stretches with hand movements, the amount of energy it can store increases.

“If you can measure the amount of energy that this can store, you can then work out its geometry very, very, very accurately,” said O’Brien.

I tried the glove on myself during a demo in Auckland and can admit that it was indeed a comfortable fit, which O’Brien says isn’t always a given in the hand motion capture world.

“The really core advantage is that we actually make garments, not devices. And by that we mean we make garments that are comfortable to wear, that don’t interfere with movement, that don’t break easily, and don’t have hard, lumpy bits of plastic,” said O’Brien. “And so the way we were able to beat out the competition in the motion capture space, if you look at any competitive product, it’s got all these lumpy bits of plastic all over and interferes moving the hand, it breaks easily. And it’s based on technology that just doesn’t naturally conform to the body.”

StretchSense closed a $7.6 million Series A investment Thursday, led by Scotland-based Par Equity with participation by existing StretchSense investors GD1, the NZ-based venture capital firm, and Scottish Enterprise, Scotland’s national economic development agency.

The startup intends to use the funds to grow out its center of excellence in Edinburgh which is focused on AI and spatial computing and will work on machine learning problems to constantly improve the product — things like making a finer and more accurate capture of details, lowering the threshold of the uncanny valley in animations, and transitioning from a 2D screen to a 3D virtual world.

The startup is also working on developing a haptic glove which it will launch into VR training next that will stimulate both touch and motion in virtual worlds.

“We want to be the future of how people control and influence and touch virtual worlds, but you have to ground that in realistic business models,” said O’Brien. “And so realistic business model number one was content creation for gaming and movie studios. Number two for us would be VR training. And that’s all about solving the retraining crisis where you have people with shorter and shorter careers, but the complexity of those jobs is increasing. So you’ve got this issue where you actually need to be able to train people really quickly and often in time-critical, safety critical situations where there’s money or lives at stake.”

Once StretchSense has built a viable business in the VR training sense, the startup hopes to use a next iteration of that tech to move into the VR gaming and experience space.

“We want to create tools that the creators of the metaverse will use to build amazing virtual spaces and experiences,” said O’Brien.

StretchSense built an actually comfortable hand-motion capture glove by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

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Fisker bumps up production for all-electric Ocean SUV

Fisker is raising its manufacturing forecast two weeks before its first electric vehicle, the Ocean SUV, enters production.

The automaker plans to produce 42,400 Ocean SUVs by the end of 2023, up from an initial forecast of 40,000, due to strong demand in the U.S. and Europe.

The company said it has received 62,000 reservations for the $37,499 Ocean and expects 80,000 orders by the end of the year, compared with an initial target of 50,000.

That means that not everyone who has reserved an Ocean will receive one in 2023.

“For us, I don’t see it as a bad thing because that means we’re fully booked out, which is great,” CEO Henrik Fisker told TechCrunch.

Many of those reservations came in August, shortly ahead of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which eliminates the $7,500 federal tax credit for EVs built abroad.

“It was a Friday when it looked like Congress would pass the bill, and I immediately got together with three executives and we said, ‘Hey, what can we do?’” Fisker said.

The company scrambled to launch a redesigned website by Monday afternoon and put out a press release notifying customers they had a week to reserve the Ocean before losing eligibility for the tax credit.

“We acted quickly and enabled Ocean reservation holders to enter into a binding contract to potentially retain eligibility for the old federal EV tax credit,” Fisker said. “In less than a week, we sold out our U.S. allotment of Ocean Sport and Ultra trim levels.”

The Ocean will enter production in Graz, Austria, on November 17, the same day slated for the launch of its 3D configurator as well as updates to its mobile phone app and website. Fisker will deliver a fleet of 15 SUVs to partner Magna in December.

Fisker said it is in discussions with potential partners to boost capacity mid-2024 by adding a U.S. production site.

The automaker, which went public through a SPAC deal in 2020, reported a widening net loss of $149.3 million, or a .49 loss per share, for the quarter ended September 30. That compares with a net loss of $109.8 million, or a .37 loss per share, for the same quarter a year ago.

Revenue for the third quarter was $14 million, slightly less than the $15 million it posted for the same period last year.

During its quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, the automaker outlined its quarterly production plan for 2023. Fisker plans to build “more than 300” Ocean units by the end of the first quarter, 8,000 units in the second quarter, 15,000 in the third, and the balance of the remaining 42,400 units in the fourth.

Fisker also said it is on track to start production of its second vehicle, the Fisker PEAR crossover, in 2024 with partner Foxconn at the former Lordstown Motors plant in Ohio. Foxconn purchased the site, originally a General Motors factory, from struggling EV startup Lordstown Motors in May.

The company said it has received more than 5,000 reservations for the sub-$30,000 PEAR, an acronym for “Personal Electric Automotive Revolution.”

A third model, a luxury GT sports car known internally as Project Ronin, is still in development, Fisker said.

Fisker bumps up production for all-electric Ocean SUV by Jaclyn Trop originally published on TechCrunch

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Roku drops ~19% as it braces for a bumpy fourth quarter

As advertisers pull back on spending and supply chain disruptions persist, investors have braced themselves for an unpleasant quarter for Roku. And investors are probably right to be worried.

Roku released its fiscal third-quarter earnings results on Wednesday, revealing that it is still experiencing slow growth in active accounts and revenue in a continuously challenging environment. The company also warned investors of a weak fourth quarter, telling shareholders it expects total net revenue of about $800 million, or a 7.5% decline year over year. Roku shares dropped nearly 19% in after-hours trading once investors saw the fourth-quarter guidance.

“As we enter the holiday season, we expect the macro environment to further pressure consumer discretionary spend and degrade advertising budgets, especially in the TV scatter market. We expect these conditions to be temporary, but it is difficult to predict when they will stabilize or rebound. We, therefore, anticipate Q4 Player revenue and Platform revenue to be lower year over year,” the company wrote in its letter to shareholders.

And while Roku reported a total net revenue that beat expectations, the results are still much lower than in the past. Roku noted that its total revenue grew 12% year over year to $761 million, above its own expectation of $700 million. Analysts predicted Roku’s total revenue to reach $696 million this quarter.

“Platform revenue grew 15% year over year, which was lower than our historical growth rates but positive given the difficult macro environment. Advertising spend on our platform continues to grow more slowly than our beginning-of-year forecast due to current weakness in the overall TV ad market, and the ad scatter market in particular,” the company said.

Roku points finger at advertising slowdown for missing the mark on quarterly results

Roku missed revenue expectations last quarter and reported a total net revenue of $764 million, which was $41 million less than Wall Street’s expectations. The company blamed the slowdown in TV ad spending for missing the mark.

Meanwhile, the company also reported a net addition of 2.3 million incremental active accounts in Q3, bringing the total to 65.4 million, up from 61.3 million active accounts in the second quarter. Roku also had total streaming hours of 21.9 billion, up 1.1 billion from last quarter.

Its free streaming service, The Roku Channel, saw a jump in streaming hours of 90% year-over-year.

Roku continues to invest in The Roku Channel. Just this past month, the company launched the streaming service in Mexico, which marked a significant move for the service. Previously, The Roku Channel was only available in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada.

The Roku Channel also launched 14 new linear channels through its Live TV Guide and added Paramount+ as a new premium subscription option.

Roku tries to be smart(er)

Roku made a bold move last month by stepping into the connected home space with the launch of various smart home devices. The Roku Smart Home lineup includes security cameras, video doorbells, smart lights and voice-enabled smart plugs.

With Google and Amazon already in the smart home market, it’s likely Roku doesn’t anticipate becoming the first choice for consumers. Still, it makes sense for the company to finally monetize the smart home experience to the many consumers that already have Roku smart TVs in their homes.

During a conference call with reporters, Roku chief financial officer Steve Louden said: “Expanding into the smart home ecosystem is a natural extension for Roku. Obviously, we’re a leading TV streaming platform, and smart TV is usually at the center of someone’s smart household. It’s a good extension to leverage our existing 65 million active accounts.”

The company added in its letter that it’s still “early days,” but Roku has the “necessary technology and expertise in hardware, software, and connectivity to deliver a smart home ecosystem that is simple, powerful, and delightful.”

Roku also recently launched the 2022 version of the Roku Express streaming player, a Roku Wireless Bass, as well as its software update, Roku OS 11.5, which includes new features like a universal watch list, a “continue watching” feature and a discovery hub that features short-form content.

Roku dives into smart home market with security cameras, video doorbells, smart lights and more

Roku drops ~19% as it braces for a bumpy fourth quarter by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

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Revere is creating a ratings system for the venture capital industry

The venture capital industry is built on signals. Lead investors help close rounds, pro rata rights show promise of a company, and the partner title gives validity to folks within firms looking to close deals.

Revere, a new bet being built by former AngelList executive Eric Woo and family office operator Chris Shen, is playing upon these characteristics. The startup, launching publicly today, is building a rating system for the venture capital industry. The goal is to create a more standardized way to track information about emerging fund managers, so that institutional investors know how to navigate the shifting landscape.

“There’s just too much influence in a small number of people, where if Keith Rabois or Elon Musk just tweet something, everyone just jumps on the bandwagon.” Woo said. “In the space of emerging managers, typically that signal comes from big anchor LPs.”

How it works

Revere’s pitch is that a wider audience wants to participate in backing venture capitalists; they just need the signal on where to go and how to gauge (since proof of consistent returns aren’t necessarily a reality thanks to the whole 10-year horizon thing).

Using data provided by an emerging venture firm, Revere uses 20 categories to verify, aggregate and research into the quality of the firm across 5 areas: sourcing, team, value add, track record and firm management. It then creates a heat map, using the same provided data set, that shows, upon quick glance, a firm’s strengths and weaknesses in said categories. Research reports include everything from fund formation details, management structure, strategy and service providers, when evaluating the firm. It’s doing due diligence, and to date, Revere has written over 80 reports.

The strategy is reminiscent of what Cambridge Associates has been doing for years, but the startup claims to do it cheaper, faster and with emerging fund managers as a key focus. For example, Revere doesn’t charge fund managers for reports; instead it charges LPs on a per-rating basis, or a monthly subscription fee for access to all reports. The 11-person startup currently takes around two weeks to whip up a report. Over time, if demand increases, it will get harder to turn around reports in that same timeframe.

As Revere gathers more data, it sees an opportunity to create more performance benchmarks for the asset class, something that Pitchbook and Cambridge Analytics hasn’t done well, per Woo. “The moment we’re able to stand up and say here are the benchmarks, and we’re showing you why funds that are smaller, at an earlier stage are outperforming, then we think that’s going to be literally a sea change in terms of perception of risk,” from the LP side.

The startup currently has over 100 funds on it platform. Revere declined to share any customer names, but said that one of its first customers was a sizable investment consultant. The company doesn’t see itself becoming a marketplace that helps conduct transactions between verified firms and interested LPs; but did confirm that millions have been invested in funds as a result of its reports.

While Revere is not able to widely disseminate a report with actual fund manager data, the format, tone, and structure of the sample data in the template report below gives a good sense of what subscribers see.

REVERE Ratings – Lantern Ve… by TechCrunch

 

But who rates the ratings?

Ratings is a sensitive topic in venture, only reinforced by some of the reactions I got by investors when telling them about this ratings platform. VC ratings sites have popped up in the past, largely led by and for founders, but have always struggled with negative bias selection and the difficulty of verifying individual accounts. Backchannel, currently accepting beta users on its Testflight, wants to be a private subreddit for founders and LPs. Revere will need to convince investors that this isn’t a ranking of who’s hot and who’s not, but instead research-based recommendations meant for LPs (not tech twitter).

Still, Revere could find itself falling into the same trap that other have. Subjectivity in some of the qualitative reporting of new venture firms could raise questions. The company doesn’t use hard science or artificial intelligence to make conclusions about a firm, meaning that bias could easily sneak in. Would Woo feel stronger about a former AngelList exec raising a new fund, or would Shen look especially for people who understand the depths of the family office world? The difficulty is getting people to lean on data, instead of brands, when it comes to backing new ventures.

Woo and Shen believe that Revere’s job isn’t necessarily to give a thumbs up or thumbs down on if a certain venture fund or person is a good idea, but instead offer a whole picture on what one entity is offering in a current moment in time. That said, in a mock-up of a report, Revere showed that it rates firms using categories like “excellent” and “best in class,” a nomenclature reserved for “all-around performers who rate well across multiple categories.” Every year, the company ranks a few firms as either best in class, rising stars, or verified.

“Part of the reason people love investing in venture capital is for the intangibles, right? If they just purely wanted returns, and sort of good risk-adjusted returns, there’s other asset classes,” Woo said.

3 views: How due diligence will change in 2022

 

 

So far, Revere has raised $5.62 million since launching; including a May 2021 pre-seed round of $1.35 million from investors including AngelList, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and Blue Future Partners. It also raised a $4.27 million round from Cherubic Ventures, Overlay Capital, Benhamou Global Ventures, Oyster Ventures, MDSV, and others.

Instead of trying to get rid of investor’s need to pattern match and check specific boxes, Revere wants to disrupt the industry through standardization. Let’s see if the market is ready to ask for help; and if the standard is tired enough to be disrupted, PDF style.

Venture capital will soon be brimming with ghosts

Revere is creating a ratings system for the venture capital industry by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch

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Web3 infrastructure startup Tenderly takes on Infura, Alchemy with new node offering

Web3 developer tooling startup Tenderly is getting into the node game with a new product it announced today called Web3 Gateway. The product will help web3 developers read, stream and analyze blockchain data, according to the company.

The offering builds on the company’s observability stack, which it says indexes over nine billion transactions across more than twenty blockchain networks.

While many blockchain and crypto companies have struggled to grow amid unfavorable market conditions, infrastructure providers such as Tenderly have remained relatively resilient to the headwinds, buoyed by the trend of steady developer interest in building web3 products.

The new offering is a sign of competition between web3 infrastructure providers heating up, as it puts the startup in direct competition with ConsenSys, the company that owns popular node-as-a-service provider Infura, and Alchemy, another widely-used node provider in the industry. Prior to this, Tenderly was focused solely on the smart contract space with its dashboard and API that helped engineers develop, test and monitor the health of decentralized applications.

“Unlike other nodes, Tenderly Web3 Gateway is tightly integrated with the rest of the Tenderly development platform, eliminating development, test, and infrastructure silos from your dapp building process and helping smart contract developers save time and costs,” Tenderly CEO Andrej Benčić told TechCrunch in an email.

Node providers, are often compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for web3 companies because they provide a critical layer of blockchain infrastructure. One aspect of Tenderly’s offering that differentiates it from other node providers is its transaction simulation platform, which Benčić said is already serving 50 million simulations per month to web3 apps such as Instadapp, Yearn, Safe and Yield.

The Belgrade, Serbia-based startup last raised a $40 million Series B announced in March this year, just before crypto prices started a substantial descent. The financing came just months after the startup’s Series A round and it was announced in the same month as Alchemy’s $200 million Series C extension, which valued the latter company at $10.2 billion.

Blockchain infra startup Tenderly raises $40M after seeing 500% YoY revenue growth

The company says its platform is used by tens of thousands of developers from apps such as Uniswap, Yearn Finance and OpenSea and that it works with the majority of the top 100 Ethereum projects, TechCrunch reported in March.

Yasmin Razavi, a growth investor at Spark Capital who helped lead the firm’s investment in Tenderly, told TechCrunch that the startup’s new offering came as a result of its developers finding they could not rely on existing node providers for their purposes and deciding to instead build out that capability themselves.

“The issues you hear with Alchemy and Infura are mostly around their inability to scale,” Razavi said.

According to Razavi, customers report that Tenderly’s offering is three times as performant as Alchemy’s based on beta testing the company has conducted. While its performance has yet to be validated in the public realm, it’s clear that this offering brings Tenderly closer to being a full-suite provider of web3 infrastructure services and therefore a more formidable force in the subsector.

“With this latest release, we complete our end-to-end promise to our developers, supporting them from the very first steps of writing and debugging Smart Contracts all the way to providing full infrastructural support for dapps once they hit the mainnet,” Benčić said.

Want to hear from the best and brightest in crypto? Attend TechCrunch Sessions: Crypto on November 17 in Miami. Get your tickets here.

$10B crypto developer platform Alchemy buys coding bootcamp in first-ever acquisition

Web3 infrastructure startup Tenderly takes on Infura, Alchemy with new node offering by Anita Ramaswamy originally published on TechCrunch

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HBO series ‘The Last of Us’ premieres this January

“The Last of Us,” HBO’s upcoming original series, gets an official release date of January 15, 2023, WarnerMedia announced today. Based on the popular video game, the series will make its debut on HBO at 9:00 p.m. ET and then stream in 4K on HBO Max.

It appears HBO Max is looking to compete with streaming giant Netflix, which has adapted many video game franchises into series such as “Arcane,” “Resident Evil” and “Witcher,” among others. While Warner Bros. Discovery last reported a total of 92.1 million subscribers across HBO, HBO Max and Discovery+, the company still lags behind Netflix’s whopping 223.09 million subs.

“The Last of Us” is likely HBO Max’s chance to pull in fans of the game to subscribe to the streaming service. The video game launched in 2013 and 17 million copies were sold across PlayStation 3 and PS4 users in 2018.

The series will feature a ton of familiar characters from the game, such as Joel, who’s played by Pedro Pascal, and Ellie played by Bella Ramsey, along with Tommy (Gabriel Luna), Tess (Anna Torv), Sarah (Nico Parker), Frank (Murray Bartlett), Bill (Nick Offerman), Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), Florence (Elaine Miles), Riley (Storm Reid), Perry (Jeffrey Pierce), Henry (Lamar Johnson), Marlon (Graham Greene) and more.

HBO Max releases ‘The Last of Us’ trailer to bring more gamers to the streaming service

HBO series ‘The Last of Us’ premieres this January by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

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