Samsara Eco is working to replace plastic packaging with fossil fuel-free alternatives

by with No Comment Tech

Concept illustration about decarbonization, showing ferns growing from the ground. A large crystal ball with CO2 written inside, surrounded by smaller crystal balls with icons representing recycling, wind power and other climate themes, is superimposed over the main image.

Image Credits: Sakorn Sukkasemsakorn (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Samsara Eco makes and sells fossil-free polymer resins. These resins can be integrated into supply chains and potentially replace plastic packaging and textile products with more sustainable alternatives.

The Australian startup made a significant stride on Wednesday, securing an additional $65 million in all equity ($100 million AUD). The round was co-led by Temasek and Australian deep tech investment fund Main Sequence. This investment, which also saw the participation of new and existing backers, including DCVC, Hitachi Venture, Lululemon, Titanium Ventures and Wollemi Capital, brings Samsara’s total raised to $105 million ($164 million AUD) since its 2020 founding.

A lot has changed since its last raise in 2022, CEO and founder of Samsara Paul Riley told TechCrunch. “We’ve continued to build out our library of enzymes and now have the ability to recycle the notoriously difficult nylon 6,6 along with polyester and nylon 6,” Riley said. “We formed a partnership with Lululemon and saw our first product [made from enzymatically recycled polyester] launch in the market earlier this year.”

Nylon 6,6, also known as nylon 66, is a synthetic polymer commonly used in the textile and plastic industries.

Samsara’s Jerrabomberra, New South Wales facilities are currently under construction. Riley explains that the space will provide services to potential clients, such as global brands, to partner, test and create with Samsara Eco. In addition, the outfit has ambitious plans to expand its team in North America and open its first facility on the continent. The new capital will also be used to bring additional facilities to Southeast Asia in the next few years, where many manufacturing brands base their operations. “Creating pathways to broader commercialization on a global scale is our focus,” Riley told TechCrunch.

Lululemon, meanwhile, represents Samsara’s first textile partner.

“With the [Lululemon’s] products, we’ve made major progress for the future of sustainable fashion and circularity and have done so with a lower carbon footprint,” Riley said. “That’s what makes our process unique; we not only deliver on circularity but also carbon. The ability to recycle nylon 6,6 and polyester shows the potential to give clothes an infinite life and with it, ensure they never end up in landfills again.”

The four-year-old startup says it is seeing strong demand from the apparel and consumer packaged goods industry. Its technology is applicable to other sectors, Riley said, adding that the company plans to enter the automotive and electronics sectors next.

Samsara was founded in 2020 in collaboration with the Australian National University (ANU), Woolworths (an Australian supermarket and grocery store) and Main Sequence Ventures to develop a biological catalyst (enzyme) to create a new approach to recycling. Since then, Samsara has been focusing on scaling its family of enzymes for plastic recycling.

This approach will allow people to divert plastic from landfills and oceans, according to the company.

“The issue around conventional plastic recycling is that the plastic degrades over time, or it ends up being converted into other products that don’t depend on the structural integrity of its original form,” Riley said. “For example, when you see clothes with a recycled tag on them, most of the time you see a product made from recycled packaging, like plastic bottles. It’s not recycling, it’s delayed landfill.” 

Some alternate approaches, like chemical recycling, are also bad for the environment, according to the CEO. While they can recycle plastics, the process is often carbon-intensive, using heat and leaching chemicals, which is potentially worse than creating plastics from fossil fuels, he explained.

What sets Samsara’s patented recycling technology EosEco apart from conventional recycling is its ability to reduce the end-to-end recycling time. Operating at a lower temperature and pressure, it significantly cuts down on energy, heat and carbon emissions, achieving a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) well below the carbon footprint of fossil fuel-derived virgin plastics.

“We’re also well ahead in terms of our ability to recycle a range of plastics, including mixed and colored polymers,” Riley said. “We are continuing to build out our enzyme library to recycle more plastics at scale in the future. If we get it right, our technology will be used to recycle 1.5 million tonnes of plastic per annum by 2030, saving millions of tonnes of carbon entering our planet.”

The latest funding comes about one-and-a-half years after the startup raised its roughly $34.7 million Series A ($54 million AUD),” Riley said. Samsara did not provide its valuation.

The outfit has a team of 60 staff across Australia and North America, with plans to expand headcount in North America and Singapore to 90 by the end of 2025.

This article has been updated with the total raised funding figure due to the miscalculation from the company side.

The 5 most interesting startups in this IndieBio cohort

Apple will replace CFO Luca Maestri next year

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Olly Curtis/Future / Getty Images

Apple announced today that Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri will step away from his executive role, effective January 1. Kevan Parekh, Apple’s current VP of Financial Planning, will be promoted to CFO after 11 years at Apple.

Maestri has been CFO at Apple since 2014, and he’s now transitioning to a different role in the company, where he will report directly to CEO Tim Cook. Cook said in a press release that Maestri will continue leading the corporate services team, which encompasses information security and real estate.

Apple did not provide a reason for this shift, but said that it is “part of a planned succession.”

Presti founders

Presti is using GenAI to replace costly furniture industry photo shoots

by with No Comment Tech

Presti founders

Image Credits: Presti

If you’ve ever bought a sofa online, have you thought about the homes you can see in the background of the product shots? When it’s time to release a new collection, furniture brands usually spend a small fortune on photo shoots. It’s a cumbersome and expensive process as it’s not easy to move furniture around.

That’s why a French startup called Presti, founded in November 2022, is using generative AI to turn a single product image into a realistic lifestyle photo. The company has just raised a $3.5 million seed round led by the global tech investment firm Partech, with several business angels also participating.

“Very quickly, we picked up the phone and talked with 50 potential users,” Presti co-founder and CEO Nabil Toumi told TechCrunch. “And everyone was saying the same thing. Creating product visuals was a process that took a very long time, cost a lot of money and they didn’t have a simple solution for creating these photos. At the same time, it was really the most important asset for brands so that they can create a unique identity and sell online.”

Presti turns this:

Image Credits: Presti

Into this:

Image Credits: Presti

At first, Presti didn’t narrow down its focus to furniture companies. But the startup quickly realized that furniture companies faced some particularly difficult pain points.

“For a photoshoot, they needed to rent a nice house, they needed to transport products — so they had high logistics costs associated with that. And those photo shoots were planned months in advance and ended up costing them hundreds of thousands, even millions of euros a year,” Toumi said.

At its core, Presti uses Stable Diffusion XL as its foundation model. It has been retrained and tweaked so that it works particularly well for product imagery in the furniture industry.

At first, the team tried to use a vanilla version of Stable Diffusion XL. But they quickly realized that there were issues. “You’re going to have legs added to your sofa, and the backrest will be distorted,” Toumi said. Similarly, it was hard to get the perspective right. For instance, the wall behind the sofa needs to be parallel to the sofa.

“At the same time, something that is really important is the dataset on which we’ve trained our model. We currently have over 75,000 images of ultra-high quality photos of furniture in our industry, which we can use to train our model to reinforce the learning process for a specific use case, for this type of photo,” Toumi said.

Presti didn’t want to stop at background generation. Customers can also add accessories. For instance, if you’re generating product shots for a new sofa, you can add cushions. These cushions will project a realistic shadow on the sofa so they don’t look like something that was added in Photoshop.

Similarly, furniture brands usually have several variations of the same model with different textures and colors. While this is still a work in progress, Presti hopes its customers will be able to swap the material using its tool. As a result, it’s going to be much easier for companies using Presti to release new products.

On the flip side, freelance photographers aren’t going to like this new product. And whether the creativity and originality that other skilled humans who may work on a physical photo shoot, such as location stylists, can be entirely replaced through machine-generated backgrounds — without the resulting artificial lifestyle images looking a bit same-y — is one open question.

While Presti mostly works with mid-sized furniture companies, it also has a strategic partnership with Maisons du Monde, one of the largest furniture retailers in France. In addition to Partech, other investors in the startup include Maxime Brousse, Thibaud Elzière, Julien Hirth, Abou Laraki and Rémi Lemonnier.

A close-up photograph of ants climbing on palm oil fruit with a blurry green background.

Startup brewing waste to replace palm oil gets Gates Foundation cash

by with No Comment Tech

A close-up photograph of ants climbing on palm oil fruit with a blurry green background.

Image Credits: CHAIDEER MAHYUDDIN

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pumping $3.5 million into C16 Biosciences, the Y Combinator-backed company fermenting alternatives to the environmentally destructive palm oil business. The Gates grant comes alongside a $1 million check from Elemental Excelerator, a nonprofit accelerator that backs climate tech “with deep community impact.”

You can find palm oil pretty much everywhere — in soaps and biofuels as well as chocolates and instant ramen. While the industry’s given itself something of a makeover lately, deforestation linked to palm oil production is once again on the rise.

Using yeast and agriculturally derived feedstocks, C16 already brews an alternative to the seed oil for use in beauty products, under the name Palmless.

With the new funds, the startup will develop new oil recipes for use in food, utilizing both “waste stream feedstocks and non-agriculturally derived feedstocks,” C16 co-founder and CEO Shara Ticku told TechCrunch. “To expand on the latter,” the co-founder added in an intriguing hypothetical, “this may include utilizing feedstocks derived directly from carbon capture.”

Deforestation is a climate problem. A 2020 study found that climate pollution from palm oil plantations alone equate to about half that of the whole aviation industry. More broadly, deforestation is responsible for nearly a third of all carbon dioxide emissions since 1850, according to MIT ecologist Jerry Melillo.

In addition to the Gates Foundation and Elemental, C16’s previous investors include Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy and DCVC. C16 tells TechCrunch that it’s raised $36.3 million in equity funding to date, as well as $2 million in grant funding via the Department of Energy and Agile BioFoundry. 

Data moving through a circuit board with CPU in the center.

Semron wants to replace chip transistors with 'memcapacitors'

by with No Comment Tech

Data moving through a circuit board with CPU in the center.

Image Credits: Ignatiev / Getty Images

A new Germany-based startup, Semron, is developing what it describes as “3D-scaled” chips to run AI models locally on smartphones, earbuds, VR headsets and other mobile devices.

Co-created by Kai-Uwe Demasius and Aron Kirschen, engineering graduates from the Dresden University of Technology, Semron’s chips use electrical fields to perform calculations instead of electrical currents — the medium of conventional processors. This enables the chips to achieve higher energy efficiency while keeping the fabrication costs to produce them down, Kirschen claims.

“Due to an expected shortage in AI compute resources, many companies with a business model that [relies] on access to such capabilities risk their existence — for example, large startups that train their own models,” Kirschen told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The unique features of our technology will enable us to hit the price point of today’s chips for consumer electronics devices even though our chips are capable of running advanced AI, which others are not.”

Semron’s chips — for which Demasius and Kirschen filed an initial patent in 2016, four years before they founded Semron — tap a somewhat unusual component known as a “memcapacitor,” or a capacitor with memory, to run computations. The majority of computer chips are made of transistors, which unlike capacitors can’t store energy; they merely act like “on/off” switches, either letting an electric current through or stopping it.

Semron’s memcapacitors, made out of conventional semiconductor materials, work by exploiting a principle known in chemistry as charge shielding. The memcapacitors control an electric field between a top electrode and bottom electrode via a “shielding layer.” The shielding layer, in turn, is controlled by the chip’s memory, which can store the different “weights” of an AI model. (Weights essentially act like knobs in a model, manipulating and fine-tuning its performance as it trains on and processes data.)

The electric field approach minimizes the movement of electrons at the chip level, reducing energy usage — and heat. Semron aims to leverage the heat-reducing properties of the electric field to place potentially hundreds of layers of memcapacitors on a single chip — greatly increasing compute capacity.

Semron
A schematic showing Semron’s 3D AI chip design. Image Credits: Semron

“We use this property as an enabler to deploy several hundred times the compute resources on a fixed silicon area,” Kirschen added. “Think of it like hundreds of chips in one package.”

In a 2021 study published in the journal Nature Electronics, researchers at Semron and the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics successfully trained a computer vision model at energy efficiencies of over 3,500 TOPS/W — 35 to 300 times higher than existing techniques. TOPS/W is a bit of a vague metric, but the takeaway is that memcapacitors can lead to dramatic energy consumption reductions while training AI models.

Now, it’s early days for Semron, which Kirschen says is in the “pre-product” stage and has “negligible” revenue to show for it. Often the toughest part of ramping up a chip startup is mass manufacturing and attaining a meaningful customer base — albeit not necessarily in that order.

Making matters more difficult for Semron is the fact that it has stiff competition in custom chip ventures like Kneron, EnCharge and Tenstorrent, which have collectively raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital. EnCharge, like Semron, is designing computer chips that use capacitors rather than transistors, but using a different substrate architecture.

Semron, however — which has an 11-person workforce that it’s planning to grow by around 25 people by the end of the year — has managed to attract funding from investors, including Join Capital, SquareOne, OTB Ventures and Onsight Ventures. To date, the startup has raised 10 million euro (~$10.81 million).

Said SquareOne partner Georg Stockinger via email:

“Computing resources will become the ‘oil’ of the 21st century. With infrastructure-hungry large language models conquering the world and Moore’s law reaching the limits of physics, a massive bottleneck in computing resources will shape the years to come. Insufficient access to computing infrastructure will greatly slow down productivity and competitiveness both of companies and entire nation-states. Semron will be a key element in solving this problem by providing a revolutionary new chip that is inherently specialized on computing AI models. It breaks with the traditional transistor-based computing paradigm and reduces costs and energy consumption for a given computing task by at least 20x.”

Dripos, software, coffee shop

Exclusive: Dripos raises $11M Series A to replace Square, Toast and 8 other pieces of software

by with No Comment Tech

Dripos, software, coffee shop

Image Credits: Dripos

Small coffee shops that relied on foot traffic were thrown for a loop when the global pandemic kept people in their homes. That’s when many coffee shop owners turned to technology to help them take online orders and payments.

Startups were also eager to help these businesses stay safely in business — and venture capital followed. For example, Joe Coffee raised some funding to help coffee shops take mobile orders, and Odeko and Cloosiv merged to combine their inventory and mobile-ordering apps. As a combined entity, Odeko subsequently raised tens of millions of dollars in venture-backed funding.

When Jack Pawlik and Avery Durrant founded New York-based coffee shop software company Dripos in 2019, they didn’t know they would soon be joining this group. The pair’s initial idea was to help local coffee shops build mobile ordering apps, similar to what Starbucks offers.

“The more we interacted with operators and shop owners, the more we realized that there was just a much bigger problem going on,” Pawlik told TechCrunch exclusively. “We were almost adding to that problem by being that kind of platform.”

Avery Durrant, Jack Pawlik, Dripos, software, coffee shop
Dripos co-founders and co-CEOs Avery Durrant and Jack Pawlik. Image Credits: Dripos

Through conversations with shop owners, Pawlik and Durrant learned that many were using a simple point-of-sale system, like Square. It wasn’t bad, necessarily, but not “meant exactly for their workflow,” Pawlik said. Many shops then employed five to 10 other pieces of software to fill in the gaps.

Pawlik and Durrant decided to pivot and build a tool that would replace Square, Toast and those eight other pieces of software with one comprehensive tool.

Dripos brings together point-of-sale; mobile payments; employee management and payroll; loyalty and marketing automation; and administrative functions like accounting and banking.

Manny Carral, owner and operator of Revolucion Coffee + Juice with five locations in Texas, recently switched his locations to Dripos and said in a statement that Revolucion was one of those companies using five different things, including Toast and Square.

“We are able to achieve this and even much more through Dripos,” Carral said. “The product has allowed us to streamline our day-to-day operations and give us time back to focus more on our customer experience.”

Blank Street cracked the code on making coffee shops attractive to VC

Dripos’ approach has caught on with other customers as well. Last year was the company’s first full year with the new tool; it now has a presence in coffee shops across 46 states. The number of locations relying on Dripos increased 400%, and the company processes hundreds of millions in annual payments.

Now the company wants to invest in areas like technology development and go-to-market, so Pawlik and Durrant secured $11 million in Series A funding. Early-stage venture capital firm Base10 Partners, known for investments in Plaid, Instacart and Figma, led the round and was joined by Cota Capital and a group of angel investors, including Y Combinator managing partner Michael Seibel, Punchh founder Shyam Rao and Bench founder Ian Crosby. In total, the company has raised $17.3 million.

As part of the investment, Base10 principal Caroline Broder, who led the Series A, joins the Dripos board.

“We have full conviction in this business model,” Broder told TechCrunch. “In the very beginning of our relationship, it was very clear that Jack and Avery had this vision of building a full suite. They built a ton of products to be able to come in and replace things like software early in the company’s lifecycle. They understand what these business owners want and need and what they’re not getting. Then they built something that’s very specifically made for them. That customer empathy is a rare quality.”

B Capital leads Odeko’s $53M Series D to help small coffee shops scale