Roundup of news and ideas from the world of startups – Week ending 13th Jan 2019
News you can use
Amazon: why it’s hard to escape its long reach – Everything Amazon does seems to make news. A recent article in the Wired magazine by Paris Martineu and Louise Matsakis highlights “WHY IT’S HARD TO ESCAPE AMAZON’S LONG REACH” In the article, the authors begin by explaining “The company is known as the “everything store,” but in its dogged pursuit of growth, Amazon has come to dominate more than just ecommerce. It’s now the largest provider of cloud computing services and a maker of home security systems. Amazon is a fashion designer, advertising business, television and movie producer, book publisher, and the owner of a sprawling platform for crowdsourced micro-labor tasks. The company now occupies roughly as much space worldwide as 38 Pentagons. It has grown so large that Amazon’s many subsidiaries are difficult to track—so we catalogued them all for you. This is our exhaustive map of the Kingdom of Amazon.”
Image : The Wried
RoboSense New Solid-State LiDAR Launched at CES 2019 for Level 5 Driverless Driving – RoboSense , a leader in LiDAR perception technology solutions and CES 2019 Innovation Award Honoree, announced today that next weekat CES 2019, they will publicly demonstrate an upgraded version of their MEMS solid-state LiDAR, an automotive grade solid-state LiDAR designed for the mass production of autonomous vehicles. The new RS-LiDAR-M1 with patented MEMS technologyoffers ground-breaking vehicle intelligence awareness to fully support Level 5 driverless automated driving. A breakthrough on the measurement range limit based on 905nm LiDAR with a detection distance to 200 meters, the upgraded optical system and signal processing technology brings remarkable final output point cloud effect which can now clearly recognize even small objects, such as railings and fences.
Purdue hits startup milestone with 200+ startups, $350 million funding in five years, nine acquired for $2.3+ billion – Purdue University hit a milestone in startup creation in 2018 with 223 startups, more than $350 million in funding and investments generated and more than 300 new jobs, officials announced today
Corporate M&A
Google buys startup to improve Assistant’s answering abilities – Google has acquired a startup named Superpod that built an app allowing users to post questions and receive answers from experts quickly — a move that will help boost Google Assistant’s ability to accurately answer users’ questions. According to a report in Axios late Thursday, Google paid nearly $60 million to “acqui-hire” the founders and purchase some of Superpod’s assets.
Alibaba to acquire Data Artisans – Alibaba has paid €90 million ($103 million) to acquire Data Artisans, a Berlin-based startup that provides distributed systems and large-scale data streaming services for enterprises. The deal was first announced by European media, including EU-Startups, before being confirmed by both Alibaba and Data Artisans through blog posts. Data Artisans was founded in 2014 by the team leading the development of Apache Flink, an open source large-scale data processing technology. The startup offers its own dA Platform, with open source Apache Flink and Application Manager, to enterprise customers that include Netflix, ING, Uber and Alibaba itself.
Failed Startups
Shuttle startup Chariot will shut down less than 3 years after its $65m sale to Ford – Ford is undergoing a large scale corporate restructuring, that includes shutting its Chariot commuter shuttle service. After Chariot raised $3m in its first 2 years, it was acquired by Ford for a reported $65m in 2016 and added to Ford’s ‘Smart Mobility’ division. In 2016, Ford paid more than $65 million for shuttle-van startup Chariot