16 October, 2024
Exclusive: Series, a GenAI game development platform, has quietly raised $28M from Netflix, Dell, a16z, others
It’s been quite the year for gaming industry exec Pany Haritatos.
Last month, he quietly closed an oversubscribed $28 million Series A for his new game studio startup Series Entertainment, according to an SEC document and confirmation from the company. Investors include Netflix, Dell Technologies Capital, with follow-on investments from seed investors Andreessen Horowitz, BITKRAFT, and F4 Fund. This comes after launching the company only a year ago with a healthy $7.9 million seed led by a16z.
In between, he’s already made an acquisition. Series bought mobile game studio Pixelberry in July, best known for its interactive fiction game Choices: Stories You Play.
Series, also known in the industry as Series AI, is on a mission to create video games using LLMs and GenAI. But more than that, it’s gunning to be the new Unity, powering legions of game developers. Haritatos and team have created the Rho Engine, which uses GenAI to help game developers build games speedily.
One can be skeptical that LLMs will really be the panacea to humanity that its loudest proponents claim. But gaming is definitely one of the areas that AI is glowing up.
Instead of designing everything from characters to elixir bottles, game developers can have AI step in to do that work and to make games more interactive than ever. NPCs can turn into rich, fully developed characters that, for instance, haggle with the gamer. Players can be given vast, perhaps unlimited, capacities for customization. And so on.
But to do all that, developers need AI-enhanced game engines. Series bills Rho as the first AI-native, multimodal full-stack game creation platform – meaning it handles visuals and audio. To be fair, there are other AI gaming engine competitors out there including, for instance, Modi.ai Engine, and Unity’s Muse Chat. But Rho says it sits in a different spot. Modi.ai performs tasks like bug catching, or identifying reasons why the games are crashing. Series views Muse Chat as more of an AI assistant. Rho, the company says, is intended for full-stack game development.
A16z investors Joshua Lu and Andrew Chen were so excited to land the seed deal a year ago with Haritatos that they penned a blog post calling Series, “a game studio and technology company that is reinventing the future of game development with generative AI.”
Part of what excited these investors was Haritatos himself. He has decades in game development and a knack of being on the cutting edge at just the right time. When Adobe’s Flash player emerged in the late 1990’s as a multimedia tech, he built his first studio making browser games and sold it to Zynga. Then he built a mobile game studio and sold it to Kongregate – a site that rose during the Flash games era. Haritatos later became CEO of Kongregate (eventually selling the company to Swedish gaming studio MTG). In 2020, he was hired to lead Snap’s games group, developing augmented reality and embedded games.
Those chops are why his investors are all big names in gaming. In addition to nabbing backing from a16z’s game-specific fund, Series landed BITKRAFT. This is a firm founded by eSports pioneer Jens Hilgers who cofounded ESL and G2 Esports, and is one of the most active game investors. Ditto for F4 Fund, a firm run by David Kaye and Joakim Achrén, two game makers who have built and sold multiple studios apiece and now invest.
Series has grown from 17 employees at the start of 2024 to over 100 now, the company says, with the team coming from companies like Zynga, Machine Zone, Google, and Snap.
While Haritatos declined an interview after TechCrunch discovered the Series A raise, his people sent an emailed statement from him that praised his investors and said, “We are thrilled that we raised a very successful $28 million Series A during a tough year for funding.”
Pitchbook estimates the Series A was for about 15% of the company, giving Series a $190 million post-money valuation. The company declined comment on the accuracy of that number.
SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son has been planning his comeback
A new Financial Times profile of Mayayoshi Son opens with SoftBank CEO seeming to hit bottom, staring at his “ugly” face on Zoom and telling himself, “I have done nothing I can be proud of.”
The scene is presented as the prelude to a hoped-for a comeback, with Son largely disappearing from the public eye after SoftBank’s Vision Fund took huge losses from investments like WeWork. Lionel Barber, who’s written a new biography of Son called “Gambling Man,” said that while Son appeared to be “doing penance,” he was actually “plotting a comeback.”
Now SoftBank is betting big on AI, finding success by taking chip design company Arm public — though even with AI, Son admits “maybe we were a little too early.”
Beyond the details of Son’s investment strategy and track record, there are some fun personal details, like his apparent fascination with Napoleon. When an activist investor brought up Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg in a 2020 meeting with Son, he reportedly dismissed them as “one-business guys.”
“The right comparison for me is Napoleon, Genghis Khan or Emperor Qin,” Son said. “I am not a CEO. I am building an empire.”
Plant-based ‘meat’ startup Tender has already nabbed a fast-food chain contract, and another $11M
Food technology startup Tender Food Inc. is a four-year-old startup elbowing its way into a market that is already crowded with well-known brands. It’s doing so well that it already secured a contract with Clover Food Lab’s fast-food chain in the Boston area.
The Somerville, Massachusetts-based company, formerly known as Boston Meats, develops plant-based alternative meat, including beef short rib, pulled pork, chicken breast and crab.
Its technology involves spinning plant protein fibers, including soy proteins, similar to the way cotton candy is made, to create structured cuts of meat, company co-founder and CEO Christophe Chantre, told TechCrunch. Berlin-based Project Eaden is also utilizing fiber-spinning technology to make alternative protein.
Chantre believes Tender’s technology beats incumbent plant-based meat products, like Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat, in taste, texture, nutrition and cost. All four of those have traditionally been barriers to mainstream adoption within the food tech industry.
“Consumers have been largely disappointed by what’s on the market,” he said. “We’re focused on investing in the technologies so that we can create better products. That was the tough thing, until now.”
Since Tender Food started in 2020, the market has grown a lot. During that time, his company evolved and matured. Two years ago, he would have described Tender Food as a technology company mainly focused on R&D. While it is still a technology company, its focus has shifted into becoming commercial.
“We are just starting to commercialize, so revenue was not a big focus, but it will be now,” Chantre said.
Some of Tender’s products have hit restaurants and universities in the Boston area, and a new partnership has Tender products now in 11 Clover Food Lab locations in the area.
“We’re a popular vegetarian chain, so, as you can imagine, we try a lot of new plant-based products,” said Chris Anderson, senior vice president at Clover, in a statement. “Tender’s stood out from the start — it’s innovative, it’s tasty, it’s a great addition to our grain bowls and salads.”
The move is buoyed by a new cash infusion of $11 million in Series A funding. Rhapsody Venture Partners led the round and was joined by existing investors like Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital and Safar Partners and new investors Claridge Partners and Nor’easter Ventures. In 2022, the company raised $12 million in seed funding.
In addition to meeting the demand for its new restaurant customer, the funding will go toward further product development. It will also go toward scaling up co-manufacturing with other companies to millions of pounds of product, Chantre said.
The company continues to trial its products in the market, including with foodservice companies and large corporations that manufacture food. In the long term, Chantre also sees Tender Food as a technology enabler for the entire food tech industry, working with a host of different players across the value chain and perhaps licensing its technologies.
Meanwhile, Tender Food recently added Mike Messersmith, former North American president of Oatly, to its board of directors. After joining Oatly in 2017, Messersmith pioneered the company’s U.S. launch. Chantre said he met Messersmith through one of his investors.
“Since we’re evolving from being a technology company, to being a technology and commercial company, we’re recruiting builders and operators like Mike, who have that experience,” he said. “In our view, it is really valuable in this next step of our growth.”
Telegram says it has 'about 30 engineers'; security experts say that's a red flag
Over the weekend, a clip from a recent interview with Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov went semi-viral on X (previously Twitter). In the video, Durov tells right-wing personality Tucker Carlson that he is the only product manager at the company, and that he only employs “about 30 engineers.”
Security experts say that while Durov was bragging about his Dubai-based company being “super efficient,” what he said was actually a red flag for users.
“Without end-to-end encryption, huge numbers of vulnerable targets, and servers located in the UAE? Seems like that would be a security nightmare,” Matthew Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins University, told TechCrunch. (Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn disputed this, saying it has no data centers in the UAE.)
Green was referring to the fact that — by default — chats on Telegram are not end-to-end encrypted like they are on Signal or WhatsApp. A Telegram user has to start a “Secret Chat” to switch on end-to-end encryption, making the messages unreadable to Telegram or anyone other than the intended recipient. Also, over the years, many people have cast doubt over the quality of Telegram’s encryption, given that the company uses its own proprietary encryption algorithm, created by Durov’s brother, as he said in an extended version of the Carlson interview.
Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a longtime expert in the security of at-risk users, said that it’s important to remember that Telegram, unlike Signal, is a lot more than just a messaging app.
“What makes Telegram different (and much worse!) is that Telegram is not just a messaging app, it is also a social media platform. As a social media platform, it is sitting on an enormous amount of user data. Indeed, it is sitting on the contents of all communications that are not one-on-one messages that have been specifically [end-to-end] encrypted,” Galperin told TechCrunch. “‘Thirty engineers’ means that there is no one to fight legal requests, there is no infrastructure for dealing with abuse and content moderation issues.”
“And I would even argue that the quality of those 30 engineers isn’t that great,” Galperin continued. “Also, if I was a threat actor, I would definitely consider this to be encouraging news. Every attacker loves a profoundly understaffed and overworked opponent.”
In other words, it’s unlikely for Telegram to be very effective fighting hackers, especially government-backed ones, with such a small staff.
Lemme guess, none of these 30 staff include privacy or compliance people, and zero third-party audit is ever done to review potential security controls restricting access to users' data. "Please trust us" is not how security works. https://t.co/w7PBkU0TJR
— JP Aumasson (@veorq) June 22, 2024
Telegram’s spokesperson confirmed the company has 30 developers working on the apps and infrastructure, but claims to have an additional 30 people on its “core team.” The spokesperson did not answer our specific questions, including whether the company has a chief security officer, and how many of its engineers work full time on securing the platform.
Last week, the well-known cybersecurity expert SwiftOnSecurity wrote on X that “The cost to run a company that has all the right cyber security tools and staff is absolutely obscene.”
“It’s hard to describe the numbers I’ve seen. Even saying this is a gray area. But it is [an] incredible headcount and spend,” SwiftOnSecurity wrote.
All to say, even the biggest companies on the planet probably don’t spend enough money, time and energy on securing themselves. Telegram has almost one billion users, according to Durov. It’s one of the most popular platforms for people working in crypto (who move millions of dollars), extremists, hackers and disinformation peddlers.
That makes it an incredibly interesting target for both criminal and government hackers. And it has — at most — just a handful of people dedicated to cybersecurity.
For years, security experts have warned that people should not see Telegram like a truly secure messaging app. Given what Durov said recently, it may be even worse than experts thought.
UPDATE: June 25, 10:31 a.m. ET: This story was updated to include comments from Telegram’s spokesperson, which were provided after publication.
Signal details costs of keeping its private messaging service alive
Uber for Teens has reignited an old debate over fingerprinting drivers
Seven years ago, Uber and Lyft blocked an effort to require ride-hailing app drivers to get fingerprinted in California. But by launching Uber for Teens earlier this year, the company inadvertently resurfaced the issue.
Now a broader debate is underway as startups, Uber, and California regulators hash out when a transportation service should be required to fingerprint its drivers.
Uber for Teens launched in February in California, allowing kids aged 13 to 17 to order their own rides under a parent’s account. Public documents show Uber reached out to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) seeking clarity on a 2016 ruling that said any transportation network company whose business involved “primarily transporting minors” would need to enforce strict background checks for drivers, including fingerprinting.
What did “primarily” really mean? Uber wanted to know. Was the Commission planning to update that term anytime soon?
That request prompted a public comments period, which has invited advocacy in favor of fingerprinting from potential competitors like HopSkipDrive, a startup that provides a ride-share service for kids.
The timing has proved serendipitous for HopSkipDrive. The startup’s main business involves helping school districts transport kids, but it also offers a product that allows parents to book rides for their kids in advance, something that could be a direct competitor to Uber for Teens.
By participating in the public comments, HopSkipDrive gets an unexpected opportunity to hold Uber — a behemoth in the ride-hailing industry — to the same standards the startup and taxi companies are held to.
HopSkipDrive has argued that Uber should have to adhere to the requirement spelled out in the 2016 ruling even though it doesn’t “primarily” transport minors. To limit those requirements “suggests that even one child, riding alone, shouldn’t be protected to the highest standards of safety,” Trish Donahue, senior vice president of legal and policy at HopSkipDrive, told TechCrunch.
At the center of the debate is whether Uber should be required to participate in the Department of Justice’s Trustline program. Trustline is a registry maintained by the California Department of Social Services that uses fingerprinting to screen caregivers for criminal arrests and convictions. It also screens applicants against the Child Abuse Central Index, which contains reports of suspected child abuse and neglect.
Uber’s teen service doesn’t make up a significant portion of its business — a spokesperson told TechCrunch teen rides account for under 10% of total rides — but that could change in time. Regardless, Uber believes its own screening system, as well as safety features included in Uber for Teens, such as live trip tracking, is adequate to keep riders of any age safe.
“We proactively engaged the CPUC long before we launched teen accounts in California to ensure parents continue to have this choice when getting their teens where they need to be,” Uber told TechCrunch in an emailed statement. “While the regulatory process will take time, we believe the CPUC will see the value teen accounts bring to busy families and drivers and how safety is embedded into the experience.”
Fingerprinting is a touchy subject for Uber. The ride-hail giant has a history of lobbying to fight initiatives in cities across the country that would mandate fingerprinting for its drivers. Uber has argued that the inconvenience of requiring drivers to get fingerprinted discourages them from signing up to the platform. The company has also said that the FBI’s fingerprint database often contains incomplete or outdated information, and that fingerprint checks disproportionately affect minorities who are more likely to have been arrested, even if not convicted.
Despite the fact that many major cities require fingerprint background checks for taxi drivers, Uber and its counterpart Lyft have largely succeeded in skirting those rules. (Although not in New York City.)
Uber argues that it doesn’t need fingerprinting to ensure adequate background checks. Aside from a motor vehicle report, Uber checks drivers for all criminal convictions, including sexual offenses. The company said in a June filing with the CPUC that it also reruns both of those driver checks annually and “monitors California drivers continuously for disqualifying criminal offenses and driving violations.”
Uber also said the company it uses for background checks, Checkr, searches every state and county where a driver has lived or had any potential interaction with law enforcement.
Background checks aside, Uber says its in-app experience for teens is geared toward safety. Only the most experienced and highly rated drivers are allowed to transport teens, the company says. In addition, live trip tracking is enabled for all teen rides, giving parents real-time updates as well as the driver’s name, vehicle information and requested drop-off location.
Teens getting into an Uber also have to give the driver a unique PIN that their parents set up, and drivers can’t start the trip without it. In addition, if a parent gives microphone permissions, then all audio recording of the ride is mandatory and can’t be turned off.
Uber said it spent more than a year developing teen accounts and consulted with safety experts like Safe Kids Worldwide, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting children from preventable injuries.
The CPUC told TechCrunch the public comment period for this issue remains open, with replies due July 12. The agency didn’t say when it expects to clarify its ruling.
Popular podcast player Overcast has been rebuilt from the ground up for its second decade
Developer Marco Arment launched the popular podcasting app Overcast a decade ago. Now, he has rebuilt and redesigned the app for the current era. While most of the changes aren’t going to be visible, one main difference is that you can no longer stream podcast episodes. Instead, you have to rely on downloads.
Arment justifies this move by saying that dynamic ad insertion used by major podcasts breaks streaming playback. Plus, with today’s network speeds, downloading episodes before playing is a more reliable method for podcast consumption.
Besides this change, Arment spent almost 18 months rebuilding the app with modern frameworks and programming languages.
The core of the app remains the same, with functions like smart speed for silence skipping and voice boost. But there are some missing features at launch, such as Siri Shortcuts support, storage management and OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) support for exporting and importing podcast subscriptions — those are coming soon.
“Most of Overcast’s code was ten years old, which made it cumbersome or impossible to easily move with the times, adopt new iOS functionality, or add new features, especially as one person,” he said in an in-app writeup.
“For Overcast to have a future, it needed a modern foundation for its second decade.”
Arment’s note said that the app is faster and has easily reachable controls for large phones. Other features include an undo button if you accidentally jumped to a different part of the podcast and setting playlist priorities.
He also said that he is working on making options for downloading and deleting episodes smarter. Plus, he is working on updating the Apple Watch app.
Overcast is available as a free download in the App Store with an optional premium subscription to unlock more features and hide ads.