A Waymo autonomous vehicle operating on a tree-lined street in Santa Monica.

Waymo cameras capture footage of person charged in alleged robotaxi tire slashings

by with No Comment Tech

A Waymo autonomous vehicle operating on a tree-lined street in Santa Monica.

Image Credits: Allen J. Schaben / Getty Images

A Castro Valley resident was charged Thursday for allegedly slashing the tires of 17 Waymo robotaxis in San Francisco between June 24 and June 26, according to the city’s district attorney.

Prosecutors say the tire slashings were captured by cameras installed on the exterior of Waymo’s robotaxis. This is the latest incident of Waymo vandalism in the Bay Area, where some residents have expressed frustration with the autonomous vehicles.

San Francisco has a history of revolting against robotaxis more broadly. In February, a crowd of people in the city’s Chinatown neighborhood committed another act of robotaxi vandalism by setting a Waymo vehicle on fire. Roughly a year ago, other robotaxi haters placed traffic cones on top of autonomous vehicles, a hack that disabled the vehicles.

This time around, Waymo’s technology seems to have caught one of these alleged crimes on video. In an email to TechCrunch, Waymo said the San Francisco Police Department reviewed footage from the Waymo vehicles’ exterior cameras in order to identify the suspect.

“We can confirm that charges have been brought against the individual who aggressively vandalized a number of Waymo vehicles, some with riders present,” said Waymo spokesperson Katherine Barna in an email. “Waymo is also taking steps to recover the damages sustained, and mitigate the potential for future events.”

Prosecutors allege these tire slashings, which occurred in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood, are connected to another case of robotaxi vandalism in the city’s files. In that case, the suspect Ronaile Joshua Burton is alleged to have approached a three-car caravan of Waymo vehicles and stabbed a knife into their tires during the same time period.

“I would like to thank the San Francisco Police Department for their careful investigation in this case,” said San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins in a press release. “The destruction of other people’s property will not go unaddressed in San Francisco. People who vandalize property must be held accountable for their actions.”

Burton has pled not guilty to all 17 charges. The damage to each vehicle is estimated at more than $400. Prosecutors placed the suspect in custody with no bail while awaiting trial, citing the “public safety risk” they pose. Her court date is set for Friday, July 12.

Deputy Public Defender Adam Birka-White, who is representing Burton, said in a statement that his client is in need of help and not jail. The public defender’s office intends to aggressively fight these charges, he said in a broader statement that also criticized the District Attorney’s office for prioritizing the punishment poor people at the behest of corporations.

Waymo says it carefully reviews any requests from law enforcement before handing over its vehicles’ videos. The company says it challenges, limits or rejects requests that do not have a valid legal basis or are overbroad, and has done so in the past.

The San Francisco District Attorney’s office declined to comment further.

Correction: This story originally misstated the residence of the suspect. They live in Castro Valley. The article has also been updated with a statement from Burton’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Adam Birka-White and clarifies that Burton uses she/her pronouns.

Waymo cameras capture footage of person charged in alleged robotaxi tire slashings

by with No Comment Tech

A Waymo autonomous vehicle operating on a tree-lined street in Santa Monica.

Image Credits: Allen J. Schaben / Getty Images

A Castro Valley resident was charged Thursday for allegedly slashing the tires of 17 Waymo robotaxis in San Francisco between June 24 and June 26, according to the city’s district attorney.

Prosecutors say the tire slashings were captured by cameras installed on the exterior of Waymo’s robotaxis. This is the latest incident of Waymo vandalism in the Bay Area, where some residents have expressed frustration with the autonomous vehicles.

San Francisco has a history of revolting against robotaxis more broadly. In February, a crowd of people in the city’s Chinatown neighborhood committed another act of robotaxi vandalism by setting a Waymo vehicle on fire. Roughly a year ago, other robotaxi haters placed traffic cones on top of autonomous vehicles, a hack that disabled the vehicles.

This time around, Waymo’s technology seems to have caught one of these alleged crimes on video. In an email to TechCrunch, Waymo said the San Francisco Police Department reviewed footage from the Waymo vehicles’ exterior cameras in order to identify the suspect.

“We can confirm that charges have been brought against the individual who aggressively vandalized a number of Waymo vehicles, some with riders present,” said Waymo spokesperson Katherine Barna in an email. “Waymo is also taking steps to recover the damages sustained, and mitigate the potential for future events.”

Prosecutors allege these tire slashings, which occurred in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood, are connected to another case of robotaxi vandalism in the city’s files. In that case, the suspect Ronaile Joshua Burton is alleged to have approached a three-car caravan of Waymo vehicles and stabbed a knife into their tires during the same time period.

“I would like to thank the San Francisco Police Department for their careful investigation in this case,” said San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins in a press release. “The destruction of other people’s property will not go unaddressed in San Francisco. People who vandalize property must be held accountable for their actions.”

Burton has pled not guilty to all 17 charges. The damage to each vehicle is estimated at more than $400. Prosecutors placed the suspect in custody with no bail while awaiting trial, citing the “public safety risk” they pose. Her court date is set for Friday, July 12.

Deputy Public Defender Adam Birka-White, who is representing Burton, said in a statement that his client is in need of help and not jail. The public defender’s office intends to aggressively fight these charges, he said in a broader statement that also criticized the District Attorney’s office for prioritizing the punishment poor people at the behest of corporations.

Waymo says it carefully reviews any requests from law enforcement before handing over its vehicles’ videos. The company says it challenges, limits or rejects requests that do not have a valid legal basis or are overbroad, and has done so in the past.

The San Francisco District Attorney’s office declined to comment further.

Correction: This story originally misstated the residence of the suspect. They live in Castro Valley. The article has also been updated with a statement from Burton’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Adam Birka-White and clarifies that Burton uses she/her pronouns.

George Xing, Thomas Chen, Supaglue, Stripe

How a tiny 4-person startup, Supaglue, caught Stripe’s eye

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George Xing, Thomas Chen, Supaglue, Stripe

Image Credits: Supaglue / Supaglue co-founders George Xing and Thomas Chen

In Stripe’s annual letter, the company discussed several fast-growing areas, one of them being the “Revenue and Finance Automation” unit. Those are tools that help businesses manage billing, tax and revenue recognition. Stripe’s RFA unit will reach a $500 million annual run rate this year, the company said.

As part of its investment in RFA, the payments giant completed an “acqui-hire” of the four-person team from Supaglue, for an undisclosed sum. Supaglue raised a $6.8 million seed round in November 2021, led by Benchmark general partner Chetan Puttagunta. (Puttagunta did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.)

Supaglue, formerly known as Supergrain, is an open source developer platform for user-facing integrations. At the same time, Stripe’s been working on real-time analytics and reporting across its platform and third-party apps for the Revenue and Finance Automation suite. This team is going to help accelerate that, a Stripe spokesperson told TechCrunch.

George Xing and Thomas Chen started Supaglue in 2021 after working on the data teams at Lyft and Uber. While there, they realized that managing data and business metrics across teams was inconsistent and fragmented, which could lead to bad decisions and even worse business outcomes, Xing told TechCrunch.

Stripe’s growth continues to impress as total payment volume tops $1 trillion

So they built a product that helps companies import and centralize customer data from third-party data sources like Salesforce or other customer relationship management systems into their own applications.

How did a tiny four-person startup catch the attention, and an acquihire offer, from mighty Stripe? Mutual work acquaintances introduced them, though Xing and Chen describe meeting Stripe as “pretty serendipitous.” After folks in their extended network made the introduction, and because Supaglue was also doing a fair amount of integration work, the two companies began having conversations, and when Stripe offered to buy them, they accepted.

“A big part of the RFA suite is also a unified data platform that reconciles data from each of those products and surfaces relevant insights to the end users of Stripe via dashboards, alerts, customer reporting and real-time analytics. It’s very similar to the original problem we were solving,” Xing said.

The Supaglue acqui-hire is one of many things going on at Stripe so far this year. Between the employee stock sale deal and securing partnerships with companies like authentication startup Clerk and a fun one with electric boat startup Navier, the company has been pretty busy. Considering the growth Stripe alluded to in its annual letter, Supaglue will likely quickly find fast friends within Stripe’s ecosystem.

Deal Dive: A Stripe secondary deal worth paying attention to

Amae Health, mental healthcare startups,

Amae Health is building an in-person approach to mental healthcare in an increasingly digital space

by with No Comment Tech

Amae Health, mental healthcare startups,

Image Credits: miakievy / Getty Images

When Sonia García and Stas Sokolin decided to launch Amae Health to solve the broken care system for people with severe mental illness, they were already intimately familiar with the industry’s issues.

“I started thinking about this problem a very long time ago,” said Sokolin, Amae’s CEO. “I grew up with a sister who had bipolar disorder for many, many years, and as a family we always struggled to find her care. It seemed like everything was so piecemeal, and it broke our family apart.”

Garcia had her own experiences with the mental healthcare system, too. She lost her father to suicide when she was 16 years old, and then she and her family spent years as caregivers for her brother with schizoaffective and bipolar disorder. Sokolin and García were introduced by mutual friends at Stanford because they were both passionate about this area. The pair knew the system could be better.

They launched Amae Health in 2022 to be a new approach to helping patients with severe mental illness. Amae brings resources — including family and individual therapy, social workers, psychiatric care and medicine management — all under one roof. One physical roof, that is, as Amae is focused on an in-person approach. The startup hired Dr. Scott Fears, who had experience with this all-encompassing care approach through his work with the Los Angeles Veterans Affair Hospital, so they could iterate on and improve an existing model as opposed to starting a new one from scratch.

Amae Health just raised a $15 million Series A round led by Quiet Capital with participation from Healthier Capital, former One Medical CEO Amir Dan Rubin’s firm; Baszucki Group and Index Ventures partner Mike Volpi, in addition to all of the company’s seed investors. The startup currently has one clinic in Los Angeles and plans to use the capital to expand. Its next center will be in Raleigh, North Carolina, with locations in Houston, Ohio and New York to follow shortly after.

The funds will also be used to continue building out the company’s data platform. Sokolin said the company is using AI to go through the troves of data it collects at its clinic to find ways they can continue to improve care.

Over the past few years, many startups have launched to improve the mental healthcare system, but Amae Health’s focus area and approach stand out. Most of the mental health startups that launched in the pandemic are digital first and focused on anxiety and depression. Amae looks very different.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with having a slate of companies focused on anxiety and depression, and it’s good to see founders focused on helping people with severe mental illness, too. Severe mental health problems affect 14.1 million people in the U.S., according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. But there’s a lot less innovation in the sector.

That’s not too surprising: Solutions for people with severe mental illness don’t perfectly fit a traditional venture model in the way many telemedicine and digital solutions do. People with severe mental illness need care that is in person, making solutions more costly and slower to scale.

“When we first went out to raise money, a lot of venture investors were asking, why are you doing this in person? Why is this not virtual?” Sokolin said. “The fact of the matter is you can’t treat someone who is having delusions or auditory hallucinations virtually. The same way you can’t treat cancer virtually, you can’t treat this virtually.”

The nature of the business also means that they aren’t expanding to all 50 states right away as some digital health startups have been able to. García said the company is fine with that because it’s more focused on the outcomes than the scaling.

“That is about intentional growth and scale, not the winner-take-all market, but really being considerate and conscious about how we do grow and ensuring we are generating lasting change and recovery in these individuals’ lives,” Garcia said.

Trying to scale too fast has hurt some mental health startups. Therapy telemedicine platform Cerebral has come under fire for how it advertises to potential customers and how it handles patient data in its pursuit of scale.

This slower growth approach can and has worked in venture before, said Sokolin, a former VC at both the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Health2047. One Medical, a full-service healthcare system, including in-person care, is a prime example. The company raised more than $500 million before getting scooped up by Amazon for $3.9 billion. It’s not surprising the former CEO is a current investor in Amae.

Sokolin and García are fine with the fact that their approach has turned off some potential investors. They are focused more on building a system for quality care, not just how many patients they can see.

“There are way more individuals than anyone could ever treat,” Sokolin said about the scope of individuals with severe mental illness. “We are never going to treat anything more than a small fraction, but we want to be the best-in-class provider for those members.”