17 October, 2024
Beta Technologies unveils first passenger carrying electric aircraft
Beta Technologies unveiled Monday the next electric aircraft in its lineup — a passenger-carrying version of its ALIA vertical takeoff and landing and fixed-wing vehicles.
Electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles don’t rely on a runway, whereas fixed-wing aircraft do.
The Vermont-based startup, which has raised over $860 million in equity to date from heavy hitters like Amazon’s The Climate Pledge, is pursuing electric aviation a little differently, and more discreetly, than others in the industry. Unlike competitors Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation, Beta doesn’t want to operate its own urban air taxi network. Rather, Beta has positioned itself as the OEM that will sell aircraft and charging solutions to a host of customers.
So far, Beta has secured customers across defense, cargo delivery, and medical logistics – like United Therapeutics, UPS, Air New Zealand, and the U.S. Air Force – with a plan to launch in those markets by 2025. Customers like Archer rely on Beta’s charging network, which consists of 34 active sites, with more than 50 sites in progress.
“Flying passengers has always been a part of the plan,” Kyle Clark, Beta’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch. “We designed everything in the aircraft from a safety and space configuration standpoint to accommodate passengers. It just made more sense, from a certification and customer acquisition standpoint, to first focus on medical and cargo, and then go to passenger,” he added.
Beta hasn’t yet built a full passenger-carrying prototype, but the concept relies on much of the same design and engineering as Beta’s existing models. Clark says this creates a streamlined path to certification, manufacturing, and commercialization.
The biggest notable differences are that the passenger variant has more windows so people can look outside, and the interior features five seats plus a cabin for the pilot, a luggage compartment, and “some accouterments for people in the back to be comfortable,” like light switches and ventilation controls, according to Clark.
All versions will be able to carry around 1,400 pounds, and in some cases they already are. Beta’s aircraft has already tested cargo-carrying missions for the military, and Clark says the startup has more flight hours than any other company in the industry.
“I contend that we will have tens, if not hundreds, of cargo aircraft flying with tens of thousands of flight hours, generating the most important thing in aviation, which is trust in the safety of the product, before we start flying passengers,” Clark said.
“I believe this strategy will actually have us flying passengers before anybody else because of the trust that we developed and the regulatory path we’ve chosen to get us through those wickets faster.”
Clark estimates that Beta’s aircraft are 13 to 14 months away from Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) certification. Today, Beta has secured a “market survey ticket,” which allows the startup to fly with potential customers so their pilots can test and evaluate the aircraft.
And that strategy has already helped secure customers in the passenger arena. On-demand aviation startup Blade, which today helps the wealthy book helicopters or seaplanes to beat the traffic, placed their financially backed order for up to 20 of Beta’s eVTOLs in 2021. Other customers include aviation company LCI, which will use Beta’s aircraft to transport guests to the Aria Hotels in Greece, and Helijet, which has placed a firm order on four eVTOLs with an option to buy four more for cargo and passenger missions.
Beta is gearing up to fill those orders and more over the next couple years. The company built its first aircraft in a prototype facility, but in January, Beta opened the doors to its production facility in South Burlington. Clark said the FAA has kept a tight watch on production, which means “it’s not rocket fast,” but he expects the facility to produce hundreds of aircraft in the next year and a half. In four years, Clark expects the facility to hit a maximum capacity of 300 aircraft per year.
Clark is most excited about a future in which electric aviation can bring down the cost of regional flight significantly, allowing people who normally have to drive two to three hours to reach a commercial airport to instead get there within minutes without breaking the bank.
He noted that short regional flights today are so expensive because jet engine fuel is pricey and so are the recurring maintenance costs for jet engines themselves.
“When you go from a turbine or jet-powered aircraft to an electric aircraft, you can effectively half the cost of carriage,” Clark said. “That opens up about 10 times more markets for transporting people.”
Correction: A previous version of this article stated Beta had 20 charging sites active based on an old number the company provided to TechCrunch.
Rivian reveals first $10M in grants for long-promised Rivian Foundation
Rivian has revealed the first $10 million worth of grants from the Rivian Foundation, three years after the EV maker vowed the philanthropy would receive 1% of its equity to make the “natural world” a “stakeholder in our success.”
The company launched Monday a website for the foundation that details 41 grantees who will collectively receive just north of $10 million in funding. The recipients are mostly in the United States, with a few falling outside the EV startup’s home country.
The website lifts the hood on one of the more closely guarded promises made by Rivian around the time of its blockbuster IPO. And it comes at a time when Rivian’s stock price has cratered from its post-IPO highs, meaning the hypothetical value of the 1% of equity the company contributed to the foundation has shrunk from $643 million to just $98 million.
Until now, it was unclear what the Rivian Foundation — and an adjacent entity called Forever by Rivian — would prioritize, where it would invest, and how its strategy might be affected by a diminished pool of capital.
The list of grantees begins to answer some of those questions, and shows a company focused on land preservation and conservation, agriculture, indigenous and urban communities, and renewable energy.
The largest grant of $2 million was made to The Nature Conservancy in August this year. Rivian says the gift will “help foster the collaborative efforts needed to ensure that critical California landscapes remain places where wildlife thrives, cultural resources are protected, and people are inspired for generations to come.”
Rivian also gave $1 million to the Ocean Resilience Climate Alliance (ORCA). ORCA previously announced Rivian Foundation was involved in a collective commitment of $250 million to the alliance in late 2023, but did not detail the size of the gift. The majority of the other 39 grants range between $100,000 to $400,000.
Rivian revealed in October 2021, just one month before its IPO, an aspirational plan to create what it called Forever by Rivian. Founder and CEO RJ Scaringe, a vegan who is known to talk about climate change and renewable energy, announced his company was placing more than 8 million shares into Forever — 1% of its total equity, worth $643 million at the time — along with $20 million in cash.
But, Rivian spokesperson Peebles Squire told TechCrunch, not long after the company set up the Forever by Rivian 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, it decided the “most impactful and most transparent approach” would be to give out money through a 501(c)(3). So it established the Rivian Foundation.
Tax filings show that Forever by Rivian moved nearly $25 million into the Rivian Foundation in 2023, which the company said incorporated the cash assets of the 501(c)(4). The Rivian Foundation only distributed $123,250 in 2023, which is below the 5% of assets that U.S. tax law requires private foundations to distribute annually. Foundations are allowed by law to make up that gap in the following year, and Rivian says the Rivian Foundation has “far surpassed the minimum requirements for both 2023 and 2024” with the giving reflected by the newly-launched website.
The Rivian Foundation is vague as to where its 2023 distributions went, saying only that it gave $60,000 to “Natural Climate Solutions,” which is not a specific entity, but a concept promoted by groups like The Nature Conservancy and the World Economic Forum. The Rivian Foundation also paid $91,500 in consulting fees to Building Impact Partners, a New York-based philanthropy advisement firm, in 2023.
Rivian is now in the process of winding down the Forever by Rivian 501(c)(4), Squire said, which is why in May of this year, its tax-exempt status was automatically revoked because it had not submitted annual returns, according to the IRS’ website. He added that Forever by Rivian is “in the process” of transferring its equity to the Rivian Foundation.
“Since the original commitment to ‘Forever’ was made at the time of Rivian’s IPO in 2021, we have been working hard to establish the Rivian Foundation,” Squire said in a statement. “This includes implementing best practices in strategic philanthropy, including governance, management, strategy development (including with the support of Building for Impact and in consultation with experts and peers), grantmaking and more. The Foundation website transparently reflects the work that has been happening behind-the-scenes for some time.”
This story was originally published on September 23, 2024 at 2:15PM ET. It has been updated with responses and further information from Rivian.
Rivian reveals first $10M in grants for long-promised Rivian Foundation
Rivian has revealed the first $10 million worth of grants from the Rivian Foundation, three years after the EV maker vowed the philanthropy would receive 1% of its equity to make the “natural world” a “stakeholder in our success.”
The company launched Monday a website for the foundation that details 41 grantees who will collectively receive just north of $10 million in funding. The recipients are mostly in the United States, with a few falling outside the EV startup’s home country.
The website lifts the hood on one of the more closely guarded promises made by Rivian around the time of its blockbuster IPO. And it comes at a time when Rivian’s stock price has cratered from its post-IPO highs, meaning the hypothetical value of the 1% of equity the company contributed to the foundation has shrunk from $643 million to just $98 million.
Until now, it was unclear what the Rivian Foundation — and an adjacent entity called Forever by Rivian — would prioritize, where it would invest, and how its strategy might be affected by a diminished pool of capital.
The list of grantees begins to answer some of those questions, and shows a company focused on land preservation and conservation, agriculture, indigenous and urban communities, and renewable energy.
The largest grant of $2 million was made to The Nature Conservancy in August this year. Rivian says the gift will “help foster the collaborative efforts needed to ensure that critical California landscapes remain places where wildlife thrives, cultural resources are protected, and people are inspired for generations to come.”
Rivian also gave $1 million to the Ocean Resilience Climate Alliance (ORCA). ORCA previously announced Rivian Foundation was involved in a collective commitment of $250 million to the the alliance in late 2023, but did not detail the size of the gift. The majority of the other 39 grants range between $100,000 to $400,000.
Rivian revealed in October 2021, just one month before its IPO, an aspirational plan to create what it called Forever By Rivian. Founder and CEO RJ Scaringe, a vegan who is known to talk about climate change and renewable energy, announced his company was placing more than 8 million shares into Forever — 1% of its total equity, worth $643 million at the time — along with $20 million in cash.
Soon after, the company went silent on Forever. Rivian actually set up two entities to tackle the company’s lofty goal: Forever by Rivian, Inc., a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, and the Rivian Foundation, a “non-operating” private 501(c)(3).
Tax filings show that Forever by Rivian moved nearly $25 million into the Rivian Foundation in 2023, but that the company distributed $123,250 that year – below the 5% of assets that U.S. tax law requires private foundations to distribute annually. The foundation was cagey as to where that money went, specifically, saying only that it gave $60,000 to “Natural Climate Solutions,” which is not a specific entity, but a concept promoted by groups like The Nature Conservancy and the World Economic Forum. It also paid $91,500 in consulting fees to Building Impact Partners, a New York-based philanthropy advisement firm.
It’s even less clear what Forever by Rivian has been up to since that October 2021 announcement. There are no publicly-available filings for the 501(c)(4), and in May of this year, its tax-exempt status was automatically revoked because it had not submitted annual returns, according to the IRS’ website. TechCrunch has reached out for comment and will update the article if we receive a response.
NFL kicks off in Brazil for the first time, but reporters and fans can't post on X due to nationwide ban
The Philadelphia Eagles and the Green Bay Packers will face off tonight in their first game of the NFL season. But this season opener is a bit different. As the league seeks to expand into international markets, the two football teams have traveled to Brazil to make history by playing the first-ever regular season NFL game in South America.
For sports journalists and dedicated football fans who have traveled to São Paulo, the weekend presents an unexpected obstacle: X is now banned in Brazil.
A lot has changed on the app formerly known as Twitter since Elon Musk bought it in 2022. But what has remained constant is that it is indispensable to sports fans. Unlike Instagram, TikTok or other popular social media apps, the microblogging platform offers the perfect format to dash off quick, real-time reactions to major plays, referee calls and coaching decisions. The same is true for sports journalists, who regularly post updates on X during games. These reporters are on the ground and have direct channels to team officials, so their accounts are especially popular for sports fans during big games.
The Philadelphia Inquirer sent four sports reporters to Brazil to cover the game, but in an act of caution, posted on X to clarify that these journalists are not violating Brazilian law.
“Due to the ban on X in the country, posts from their accounts are being relayed back here and posted on their behalves,” the newspaper posted on X.
Zach Berman, a reporter for PHLY, has been tweeting from Brazil, much to fans’ confusion. Then, his wife and children posted a selfie revealing that they are the ones making these posts. Meanwhile, The Athletic’s Green Bay Packers beat reporter, Matt Schneidman, has eschewed X altogether, directing his followers to his Instagram.
The decision to ban X in Brazil has been contentious. The dispute dates back to April, when Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes demanded that X remove seven right-wing accounts posting misinformation in support of former president Jair Bolsonaro. But Musk did not comply with the takedown requests, even though he’s complied with similar takedown requests from governments in India and Turkey.
By August, X said that Moraes had threatened the company’s Brazil legal representative with arrest if X did not comply with the removal requests. So, X shut down corporate operations in Brazil, and in response, the Brazilian court ordered an immediate countrywide ban on X.
Even outside of sports, online fandoms tend to feature large Brazilian populations — it’s Brazilian users behind some of X’s biggest fan accounts for artists like Bruno Mars, Miley Cyrus and Chappell Roan. Now, as the Eagles and Packers prepare to face off in São Paulo, the cultural impact of the ban has only become more obvious.
Paris-based VC Breega hits first close of $75M Africa fund to back pre-seed and seed startups
Paris-based VC firm Breega has observed Africa’s tech ecosystem mature over the years. From receiving less than a billion dollars in venture capital per year to a record-high $6 billion, there’s also been an increase in high-growth companies, from one unicorn to seven within the span of three years.
Now the VC wants to put some of its own money behind what it sees, with a $75 million fund to invest in early-stage startups in Africa. It’s secured commitments for around 70% of the capital in the first close, the firm revealed to TechCrunch.
Since entering the VC scene in 2015, Breega has fully raised four funds: a first seed fund (€45 million), a second seed fund (€110 million), a first venture fund (€106 million) and a second venture fund (€250 million). In less than a decade, the French investor, with a portfolio of more than 100 startups across 15 countries, has reached $700 million in assets under management.
The “Africa Seed I” fund is Breega’s sixth fund (including a third European seed fund the firm is currently raising) in nine years but the first with a mandate outside Europe. Its launch coincides with opening two new offices in Lagos and Cape Town, key hubs in Africa’s tech ecosystem. These offices join Breega’s existing locations in Paris, London and Barcelona, strengthening its presence across the EMEA region.
Breega prides itself on being a founders-for-founders fund, investing across pre-seed to Series A stages. “Our DNA is all about backing founders where innovation thrives and opportunities are immense. We bring them our operational expertise because everyone on our team has been on the other side as founders or operators,” said co-founder and CEO Ben Marrel in an interview with TechCrunch.
Marrel notes that this approach, coupled with a dedicated scaling and portfolio support team, has propelled Breega to become one of the fastest-growing VCs in Europe. The intention is to replicate this success in Africa.
As such, launching a fund for early-stage startups stemmed from a desire to tap into the continent’s opportunities. What better way to do that than having local partners who understand the market dynamics and can make informed investment decisions? Larger Africa-focused firms with European roots, such as Partech and Norrsken22, operate a similar strategy.
Melvyn Lubega and Tosin Faniro-Dada are leading Breega’s Africa fund, which received backing from institutions including Bpifrance and the Dutch entrepreneurial development bank, FMO. Both partners bring decades of entrepreneurial and operational experience to the table; before joining Breega, Lubega co-founded the edtech unicorn Go1, while Faniro-Dada was the CEO of Endeavor Nigeria.
Paris-based Breega closes €250M fund, opens Barcelona office to back Iberian startups
Breega plans to invest between $100,000 and $2 million in startups across the Big Four African markets — Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa and Kenya — as well as Francophone African markets, including Morocco, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Cameroon and the DRC. The Africa-focused VC firm has already backed nine startups, including Numida, Hohm Energy, Socium, Klasha, Kwara, Coachbit and Sava, and aims to make at least 40 investments from this first fund.
In an interview with TechCrunch, the partners discussed Breega’s interest in Africa, the firm’s investment strategies, local market dynamics and the potential of untapped markets on the continent. The interview has been edited for brevity.
TC: Seventy-five million dollars is a sizeable first fund in any market, more so in Africa. If I understand correctly, the fund is for pre-seed and seed startups. But aside from the money, what value does the firm provide that founders may not find at other firms?
Melvyn: All partners and investment team members at Breega are former founders and operators. We know firsthand what it’s like to raise capital, build businesses, face failures and endure tough times. Reflecting on my experience, I struggled to find African investors who had built businesses without raising money. That’s why our goal is to be the investors we wished we had while building our businesses. Many entrepreneurs value having a sparring partner who has been there and done that before. We want to be the first check in startups, coming in quite strong and leading rounds at pre-seed and seed.
Over a quarter of our team is dedicated solely to supporting our portfolio companies across various areas, such as go-to-market strategy, talent management, governance, brand and communications. This commitment allows us to offer more than just capital; we provide our entrepreneurs with experienced sparring partners who bring international exposure and ecosystem knowledge. We find this to be not only important to our entrepreneurs but also allows us to have an outsized performance from our European experience.
What sectors is Breega keen on in Africa? And why?
Tosin: Our focus is on industries that can have a transformative impact on addressing current and future challenges across the continent, especially with the expected growth in population, such as fintech, health tech, proptech, logistics and edtech.
Melvyn: In addition, you can think of it like a Venn diagram: We target areas that offer the most significant impact, aligned with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and where Breega has significant experience from backing over 100 companies. What’s particularly beneficial is that our insights from successes in Europe and the U.S. inform our approach in Africa, helping us pinpoint where impactful opportunities align with our expertise.
It’s good you touched on that because I’m curious how Breega strikes a balance and avoids the trap of backing U.S.-style and Euro-styled companies in Africa.
Tosin: It boils down to having local partners on the ground who understand the challenges of different markets. With my extensive experience in Nigeria and Melvin’s in South Africa, our mindset remains unchanged. We don’t invest in companies because they resemble U.S. or European counterparts. Our focus is solutions that solve unique challenges specific to Africa and its diverse markets. While some similarities exist, we intentionally back solutions tailored to meet local needs.
One of Breega’s advantages is our European team’s experience. They help us understand that Africa is perhaps where Europe was decades ago. They’ve witnessed this evolution, and we’re already following a similar path. This perspective helps us recognize that it’s a journey and an evolution while also being mindful of the current state of the market and the solutions needed today.
Ben: I think what Tosin said is incredibly important. I spend a lot of time with our team in Africa, so it’s not as if we’ve just placed a team and fund there that operates independently from our main operations. No, it’s fully integrated into our culture, team dynamics and overall firm strategy. We understand these markets are unique, and we don’t expect to support the same types of companies everywhere. We’re very conscious of this and apply our knowledge of what has worked and hasn’t for us.
What is Breega’s approach to investing in certain markets versus others in Africa?
Melvyn: We don’t want to invest only in the Big Four countries (Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt and Kenya) because we understand that talent is equally distributed. That’s why we have investments in Uganda, Guinea and other markets like Francophone Africa, which is particularly important due to our strong roots in those regions. Additionally, we are committed to supporting and nurturing ecosystems through our investments. As a Pan-African fund, we need to take this broad approach.
These days, VCs are looking to be more pan-African and invest in largely untapped markets, and to your point, such an approach is vital in finding the next Wave. However, such wins are rare, so why prioritize breadth over depth in the largest markets with more potential for VC-scalable businesses?
Melvyn: The reality is that Africa gets 1% of venture capital, yet we have 18% of the population. And so, from that perspective, our role as Breega, being a European and African tier-one investor, is also to be able to go where others honestly can’t go because we believe that there’s value to be created there.
If you think about the ecosystems that we serve, there are some regions that don’t get venture capital but are still very attractive. Also, because we’re taking long-term bets on the continent, we’re very intentional about saying that our role as investors is also to catalyze certain ecosystems.
And so, to your point, you know, before Wave, people weren’t talking that much about Senegal, and it’s what it takes as an investor that understands, beyond following the herd, what fundamentally good investments look like at the early stage, and being able to leverage that experience to go there.
Would you say this model worked for Breega after almost a decade of investing in Europe?
Ben: I think it did. The advantage of people starting a business from smaller countries is that they usually start thinking globally from day one. And that’s the founders we’re thinking about right now.
The key question isn’t about talent alone but the market these founders are entering. Building a large-scale business in a small country is rare, so a multi-country strategy is crucial. We’re enthusiastic about supporting founders in smaller African countries as long as they have an international expansion plan. This approach has been successful for us in Europe, and we’re applying the same strategy in Africa.
I’d like to get a sense of where you think the African VC scene is right now regarding co-investing opportunities.
Melvyn: Many Africa-only or country-specific investors are tending to their current portfolio companies while deploying less to the new businesses. In the same vein, many don’t have the capital to deploy. When you see follow-on rounds and a series of extension rounds, you see many smaller funds struggling to participate meaningfully. And I think that’s also more of a function of the times.
Tosin: I believe the familiar names are still active in investing across various stages and markets. However, they appear to exercise more caution now compared to a few years ago, especially regarding the entrepreneurs they choose to invest in.
OpenseedVC, which backs operators in Africa and Europe starting their companies, reaches first close of $10M fund
Alexa co-creator gives first glimpse of Unlikely AI's tech strategy
![William Tunstall-Pedoe, founder, Unlikely AI [© 2017 Yolande De Vries]](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/William-TP-7.jpg?w=768)
After announcing a whopping $20 million seed last year, Unlikely AI founder William Tunstall-Pedoe has kept the budding U.K. foundation model maker’s approach under lock and key. Until now: TechCrunch can exclusively reveal Unlikely is taking a “neuro-symbolic” approach to its AI. In an additional development, it’s announcing two senior hires — including the former CTO of Stability AI, Tom Mason.
Neuro-symbolic AI is a type of artificial intelligence that, as the name suggests, integrates both the modern neural network approaches to AI — as used by large language models (LLMs), like OpenAI’s GPT — and earlier Symbolic AI architectures to address the weaknesses of each.
Tunstall-Pedoe gained public profile in the U.K. tech scene back in 2012 when Amazon acquired his voice assistant startup, Evi. Two years later Amazon launched the Echo and Alexa, incorporating much of Evi’s technology. With Unlikely AI, Tunstall-Pedoe is aiming to put himself back in the limelight as he takes the wraps off the technology he and his team have been working on since 2019, when the startup was founded.
At Stability AI, meanwhile, Mason managed the development of major foundational models across various fields and helped the AI company raise more than $170 million. Now he’s CTO of Unlikely AI, where he will oversee its “symbolic/algorithmic” approach.
In addition, Fred Becker is joining as chief administrative officer. He previously held senior roles at companies including Skype and Symphony. At Unlikely, his role will be to shepherd its now 60 full-time staff — who are based largely between Cambridge (U.K.) and London.
The AI startup claims its approach to foundational AI models will try to avoid the risks we’ve quickly become all-too-familiar with — namely bias, “hallucination” (aka fabrication), accuracy and trust. It also claims its approach will use less energy in a bid to reduce the environmental impact of Big AI.
“We’ve been working privately for a number of years and we’re very excited about our two new senior hires,” Tunstall-Pedoe told TechCrunch over a call.
Fleshing out the team’s approach, he went on: “We’re building a ‘trustworthy’ AI platform that’s designed to address pretty much all of the key issues with AI at the moment, as it pertains to… hallucinations and accuracy. We’re combining the capabilities of generative AI, statistical AI, with symbolic algorithmic methods, [and] conventional software methods to get expandability and reliability.”
He described the platform as “horizontal” in that it would “compound many different types of applications.”
Of the exact applications, he was more coy — but continued to emphasize the phrase “trustworthy AI.”
For his part, Mason said his time at Stability AI saw the company build “some amazing models” and “an unbelievable ecosystem around the models and the technology,” as he put it. It also featured the abrupt exit of founder Emad Mostaque, followed by a number of other high-profile team departures. While Mason wishes his former colleagues “all the best,” he said said he’s “super excited” to join Unlikely AI.
Stability AI CEO resigns because you’re ‘not going to beat centralized AI with more centralized AI’
Digging into the startup’s technology, Tunstall-Pedoe said the platform is composed of two things: “The word ‘neuro’ and the word ‘symbolic.’ ‘Neuro’ implies deep learning, so solving problems that machines have not been able to solve for decades… ‘Symbolic’ refers to the kind of software that powers your spreadsheets or other applications.
“One of the weaknesses of ‘neuro’ is that it’s sometimes wrong. When you train a model, you give it data, it gets better and better. But it never gets to 100%. It’s right, for example, 80% of the time, which means it’s wrong 20% of the time.”
He said this is “incredibly damaging to trust” because “the neuro calculation is opaque.” Indeed, there’s an entire field of research trying to understand what happens inside these huge LLMs.
Instead, he said Unlikely plans to combine the certainties of traditional software, such as spreadsheets, where the calculations are 100% accurate, with the “neuro” approach in generative AI.
“What we’re doing is combining the best of both worlds,” suggested Tunstall-Pedoe. “We’re taking the capabilities of LLMs, of all the advances in deep learning, and we’re combining it with the trustworthiness and expandability and other advantages — including things like cost and environmental impact — of non-statistical machine learning… The vision we have of AI is all of those capabilities, but in a way that’s completely trustworthy.”
He argues a combined approach will bring cost and environmental benefits, too, compared to today’s LLMs: “These models are incredibly expensive [to run] and environmentally unfriendly, but they are also costly in terms of trust by producing answers that are wrong.”
Why haven’t other foundational models taken a similar route?
“I think that that’s happening,” Mason responded. “Sometimes we talk about it as ‘compound architecture.’ We’ve seen the rise of things like RAG. That’s a kind of compound architecture. This is very much in the same vein, but it’s building on all of that with the advantages symbolic reasoning, making it possible to have completely accurate reasoning.”
In this respect, he said Mason believes Unlikely AI is “ahead of the wave.”
Another question is whether Unlikely AI will produce a fuller foundational model, such as OpenAI — or take a mixed approach, akin to Mistral’s, offering both foundational and open source models?
Tunstall-Pedoe said the company is still yet to decide the direction of travel: “We haven’t made any decisions like that yet. That’s part of internal discussions. But we’re building a platform and the rest is TBD… It’s a decision that we’re going to make in the near future.”
One thing is confirmed, though: It’s going to be built out of London and Cambridge: “Obviously we’ve got a much smaller population than in the U.S. and China. But London is a fantastic place to be building an innovative AI startup. There’s lots of talent here. Lots of innovation.”
While the model release timeline isn’t clear, Unlikely AI is certain about the strength of its ambition. Given AI is the number one strategic priority of every trillion-dollar market cap company out there, Tunstall-Pedoe said he’s shooting for major adoption. “We want to be massively successful, we want to have a huge impact. We’re certainly open to different ways of achieving that,” he added.
Samsung's Galaxy Ring, its first smart ring, arrives July 24 for $399
Samsung proved it could still offer up surprises when it capped off January’s Unpacked with the reveal of the Galaxy Ring. The brief teaser was understood to be key validation for the nascent wearable form factor. While the smart ring concept isn’t entirely new, the category has thus far been dominated by Oura.
At Unpacked 2024, the company shared more details about the Galaxy Ring, which represents the first take on the category from a hardware giant. Samsung has effectively beaten Apple, Google and the like to the punch, with a health and fitness device that slots in nicely with the rest of its health efforts. It can be preordered starting Wednesday at $399.
Samsung has flirted with all number of different form factors; remember the IconX earbuds with built-in heart monitoring? Throughout the course of its efforts, however, everything always seems to come back to the Galaxy Watch. The addition of a ring to its wearable portfolio is promising for a couple of reasons. First, Oura and its ilk have already proved that plenty of customer interest exists. Second, the functionality here augments — rather than replaces — all of the stuff devices like the Galaxy Watch already do.
The ring design is limiting, with a sufficiently smaller footprint and no display. As such, these devices tend to take a more passive approach to tracking. Samsung describes it as “24/7 health monitoring,” owing plenty to a generous stated battery life of up to seven days — that is, not coincidentally, exactly how Oura rates its own ring.
The Galaxy Ring is starting with the most passive of all health tracking: sleep. The device offers up a sleep “score” based on various metrics, including movement, heart rate and respiratory rate. It also performs cycle tracking based on the wearer’s skin temperature while sleeping. The product’s small size makes it a much less obtrusive sleeping buddy that a larger smartwatch.
Of course, there are some Galaxy AI implications here, as well, pulling together metrics from sleep, activity, sleeping heart rate and sleeping heart rate variability to pull together what Samsung calls “holistic insights and motivational encouragement.” Most intriguing of all, the aforementioned features are all available without a paid subscription. There’s no guarantee Samsung doesn’t go down that route eventually, but for now, that’s certainly a point it has over Oura’s $6 monthly fee.
Samsung’s Galaxy Ring ships July 24.
Alpine Space Ventures closes first fund to grow the space economy on both sides of the pond
When early SpaceX engineer Bulent Altan and long-time investor Joram Voelklein surveyed the European space sector at the end of the 2010s, they were surprised: It looked a whole lot like the beginnings of American NewSpace in the early 2000s, when SpaceX and other companies were just setting up shop.
The pair decided to go in early on a personal investment in German launch startup Isar Aerospace, but they also considered making a bigger play to more fully grasp the huge opportunity to help grow the space sector in both the U.S. and Europe. To do that, they established Alpine Space Ventures in Munich, Germany in 2020. Four years later, and after two years of fundraising, they closed their first $184 million (€170 million) fund — the largest first-time VC fund dedicated to space globally.
Their LPs include more than 20 early SpaceX employees, as well as major institutions like the European Investment Fund, the NATO Innovation Fund and others. The capital is earmarked for no more than 10-15 investments (five of which have already been made), with check sizes up to $5.4 million (€5 million), with significant dry powder reserved for follow-on rounds. Around 70% of the fund is earmarked for European companies, but the firm is very much interested in both sides of the Atlantic, Altan said.
The strong ties to SpaceX are evident in the firm’s philosophy, which Altan outlined in a recent interview. “We are very much aligned with what SpaceX has done, and we are investing in the wake of it,” he said. “SpaceX has opened up a huge satellite sector […] so you look at our portfolio, you see component builders, you see satellite builders, really people who are benefiting from SpaceX. We are staying away from the really long-term stuff, and we are probably staying away from direct competition to the 800-pound gorilla in the room, which is SpaceX.”
Alpine’s thesis is that as the space industry grows, and as more non-space companies look to benefit from access to space, there will be less of a need for any particular space company to completely vertically integrate. Instead, a supply chain will grow, similar to that in the automotive industry. The firm sees telecommunications and Earth observation as two markets that will drive the demand for things like satellite buses and components.
As it stands now, that portfolio consists of five companies (though the firm has received almost 1,000 pitches in the last two years, Voelklein said). They include K2 Space, a Los Angeles-based startup that has not been shy about its ambitions to build massive satellites for a Starship-enabled future, and German satellite builder Reflex Aerospace.
Voelklein credits much of the thesis to the team’s strong technical background: “We see missing links in the value chain,” he said. “That’s something that you only can do with this type of team.” The engineering-heavy background is evident: Alpine Space’s technical director is Catriona Chambers, an accomplished engineer whose 16-year stint at SpaceX included leading avionics for Starship, and its technical advisor is Hans Koenigsmann, who became the fourth technical employee of SpaceX in 2002.
Despite its considerable advantages, space is a unique sector with its own particular challenges for venture investing. While many companies may promise large technical moats, valuable IP and lasting physical assets, identifying those that will close on a typical 10-year fund cycle can be difficult.
Aligning technical promise and venture timelines “is the toughest part,” Altan said. “In order to do that, you have to come from the industry, you have to have understood where space is going. That’s why I think we were able to convince our investors to really go the distance with us.”
There are some aspects to NewSpace that have been normalized by SpaceX and others, but still might strike people as strange, if not downright irresponsible — like, for example, that a rocket blowing up in mid-air can still be cheered as a success, or that a first-time orbital demonstration of a novel satellite will more than likely have some hiccups. Part of Alpine’s job, both with politicians and prospective LPs, is educating them about the space industry’s new attitude of rapid hardware iteration.
The other main hurdle for anyone investing in deep tech is the fact that companies often require a lot of upfront capital. Space startups in the U.S. often use funding vehicles offered by the Department of Defense and NASA to move their tech from R&D to MVP, and more mature companies (like SpaceX) have benefited from enormous contracts that help spur innovation and bring new capabilities to the nation. Europe is just starting to follow suit and it’s likely imperative for the indigenous space sector that it does.
“Even though there is a partnership between U.S. and Europe — and we love that partnership — a good partnership also means being able to come also to the table with your own capabilities, and Europe is realizing that,” Altan said.
It took longer than anticipated to close the fund, in part due to geopolitical events like the war in Ukraine and the end of the zero-interest rate phenomenon, Altan said. “But in the end, our target mark was always €160 million and we surpassed that. So it took longer than we thought, but it was also a good thing.”
Apple reaches its first contract agreement with a US retail union
Two years ago, workers at an Apple Store in Towson, Maryland, were the first to establish a formally recognized union at an Apple retail store in the United States. Now they’re the first to reach a tentative contract agreement.
According to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers’ Coalition of Organized Retail Employees, which represents approximately 85 employees at the Towson store, the three-year agreement includes scheduling improvements, average raises of 10% over the life of the contract, a severance clause and limits on contracted employees, and a transparent disciplinary process.
“By reaching a tentative agreement with Apple, we are giving our members a voice in their futures and a strong first step toward further gains,” the union’s negotiating committee said in a statement.
The union is scheduled to vote on the deal on August 6. During the negotiations, workers voted to authorize a strike, a move that the negotiating committee described as “the first step in demonstrating our solidarity,” which would send “a clear message to Apple.”
Although there have been campaigns to unionize other Apple retail stores in the U.S., only two have been successful thus far. Apple’s contract negotiations continue with the union at an Oklahoma City store.
Apple did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.