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Apartment List - >>> NBA star Andre Iguodala on Apartment List investment: 'It's a rare thing you see with' startups
Yahoo Finance
by Melody Hahm
January 27, 2021
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nba-star-andre-iguodala-investing-silicon-valley-apartment-list-series-d-230337466.html
As more Americans get priced out of homeownership, they continue to extend their time apartment hunting and hopping. With over one-third of the U.S. population renting their home, the category has seen massive growth during the pandemic, and Apartment List, a San Francisco-based startup, has benefited from this trend.
“We actually saw record numbers over the last decade. The most searches ever for apartments was this summer. And so, it's been really incredible. It's proven that consumers in America are still willing to move, even in the midst of a pandemic. We find ourselves at this intersection of a lot of mobility in America,” Apartment List founder and CEO John Kobs, who first founded the company in 2011, said in an interview with Yahoo Finance on Wednesday.
After announcing a $50 million Series D round of funding last month, the company has raised an additional $10 million led by high-profile names including the actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas, singer Lizzo, and sports legends Alex Rodriguez and Andre Iguodala.
The platform, which houses 5.5 million listings and has 30 million registered users, currently has a $600 million valuation and logged a profitable 2020.
The profitable piece was an immediate point of attraction for NBA star Iguodala. “It's a rare thing you see with startup companies. Even when companies who have IPO-ed or who are public traded companies are never profitable. So what John is able to do, he's done in such a quick amount of time, is an amazing thing,” he said in an interview with Yahoo Finance on Wednesday.
Iguodala has made a name for himself on the basketball court and an early tech investor with a portfolio boasting Zoom (ZM), PagerDuty (PD), Data Dog (DDOG), Locker Room and AllBirds, to name a few. He is also a general partner at Catalyst Fund, which has a primary focus on Black, Latinx, and female founders. He also co-founded The Players Technology Summit, an annual conference that focuses on connecting business leaders with professional athletes.
Investing in underfunded communities
Clearly, his latest investment is providing a valuable tool for apartment hunters. Still, this doesn’t solve the bigger issue of many Americans unable to afford their monthly rent payments. Ten million families owe $57.3 billion in back rent, utilities and late fees, according to a new analysis by Moody’s Analytics economist Mark Zandi and Urban Institute fellow Jim Parrott.
Iguodala said Apartment List’s mission in helping underserved groups, including homeless women, to find apartments on the platform, was another draw for him.
“I was told not only is this the platform that makes economic sense in terms of investing, but also serving underprivileged people with. Part of our mission with the Catalyst Fund is investing in underfunded communities... so it's also platforms that serve them as well. So not just the founders, but platforms to serve them, and this is definitely a unique opportunity that goes above and beyond just investing in a smart startup that's going to make money, but it's also certainly those from the communities that I come from.”
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BioCatch - >>> The Leader in AI-Driven Behavioral Biometrics
https://www.biocatch.com/company/our-story
BioCatch was founded in 2011 by experts in neural science, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and cyberterrorism. The newly-founded company had a significant mission: to address next-generation digital identity challenges by focusing on online user behavior rather than static authentication measures, like passwords or endpoint security. They discovered an untapped goldmine.
Powerful behavioral insights — gleaned from the analysis of more than 2,000 physical and cognitive behavioral parameters — were able to support different use cases across the digital identity lifecycle. The technology enabled the holy grail of the modern digital era — seamless and secure online experiences. Behavioral biometrics, a technology used to identify people based on their behavioral parameters, was born.
BioCatch founder Avi Turgeman began pursuing a theory that people interact with machines in unique, measurable ways while serving in military intelligence. Drawing on years of experience exploring white-hat hacking, system vulnerability management and cyberterrorist operations, Turgeman turned his attention to online fraudsters and their identifiable signatures, co-founding BioCatch with Benny Rosenbaum.
In developing their AI-driven platform to passively identify both human and non-human behaviors online, BioCatch upended the paradigm of having to choose between security and convenience. Today, the company continues its commitment to innovation through an unparalleled IP portfolio of more than 60 granted or pending patents.
The BioCatch platform is deployed by major banks and other global enterprises to help manage their digital identity challenges. The technology prevents new account fraud, authenticates online users, prevents account takeover fraud and detects vishing scams, generating impressive returns on investment that come from catching more fraud as well as reducing false positives and unnecessary escalations.
BioCatch has been recognized for its industry leadership and cutting-edge approach to behavioral biometrics and digital identity in the CB Insights AI 100, One World Identity Leading Innovators in Identity, Deloitte Technology Fast 500, Florin Awards for Best Innovation in Securing Transactions and more.
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>>> BioCatch offers a range of behavioral authentication and threat detection solutions for web and mobile applications. Available as a cloud-based solution, BioCatch collects and analyzes more than 2000 cognitive parameters to generate unique user profiles. Organizations use the platform to continuously authenticate users during their online sessions, protecting against cyber threats and fraudulent activity, such as account takeover and RAT-in-the-Browser (RitB), remote access, and automated account manipulation.
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https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/biocatch?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=profile_cta&utm_campaign=yahoo_finance
>>> EyeLock (private co)
EyeLock's technology provides an unprecedented level of convenience and security with unmatched biometric accuracy, making it the most proven way to authenticate identity aside from DNA. EyeLock's proprietary iris authentication technology looks at more than 240 unique iris characteristics and provides a fast, user-friendly authentication experience.
EyeLock iris authentication is suitable into other technologies and is suitable for use in many market segments. While biometric modalities such as facial and fingerprint recognition are satisfactory for low to medium security applications, iris provides the highest level of security and convenience.
Notable use cases for iris identification exists today within enterprise, healthcare, financial services, education, corrections, stadiums, border control, automotive, government, and other prominent business applications.
https://www.eyelock.com/technology/
Eyelock researchers and scientists are working in labs and in the field to create technology to improve every facet of identity based product and technology, from access control, border solutions and transportation to advanced banking and payments applications. EyeLock Corporation is at the forefront of providing the most secure and cost effectiveways in which to reduce identity theft and fraud.
Innovation doesn't stop with todays’ technology. The future possibilities are endless and Their world class researchers are working on a wide range of projects - from technology that can identify people in motion at distances greater than 50 feet - creating endless possibilities for Identification in Anonymity®, to embedding Their industry leading technology in a form factor smaller than a USB drive, to incorporating the most advanced privacy components and delivering security with all the privacy preferences required to satisfy today’s digitally driven consumers.
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>>> Stripe to Offer Citi, Goldman Accounts Through E-Commerce Giants
Bloomberg
By Jennifer Surane
December 3, 2020
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-03/stripe-to-offer-citi-goldman-accounts-through-e-commerce-giants
Online stores to have access to checking accounts, services
‘Business banking has largely been left behind,’ Stripe says
Stripe Inc. will team up with some of the world’s largest banks to offer checking accounts to businesses that sell their wares on e-commerce platforms such as Shopify Inc.
Stripe said banks including Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Barclays Plc will now be able to offer checking accounts and other financial services through e-commerce providers. If a coffee shop, for instance, uses Shopify to sell mugs and coffee beans online, it will now be able to open a bank account too.
“Everything about running an online business has been transformed by technology, but business banking has largely been left behind,” Karim Temsamani, head of banking and financial products at Stripe, said in a statement. “But we’re changing this.”
Businesses use Stripe’s software to accept online payments, and the company has benefited during the pandemic as people stuck at home have relied more heavily on e-commerce to do their shopping. The company is in talks to raise a new funding round that could value it at as much as $100 billion, Bloomberg reported last month.
For online firms, setting up a bank account takes an average of seven days, Stripe said. Almost a quarter of businesses ultimately have to send a fax to open the account, and more than half need to visit a bank branch. With its latest offering, which will be known as Stripe Treasury, the company is seeking to disrupt all that.
Still, Stripe is relying on established banks for the service.
“Our vision is for this partnership to fuel global commerce by enabling Stripe to launch the next-generation banking proposition for their clients,” Manish Kohli, global head of payments and receivables in Citigroup’s treasury and trade solutions business, said in the statement.
Stripe’s plans were reported earlier Thursday by the Wall Street Journal.
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>>> Nuro Gets First California OK to Charge Money for Self-Driving Services
By Reuters
Dec. 23, 2020
U.S. News & World Report
https://www.usnews.com/news/technology/articles/2020-12-23/nuro-gets-first-ever-permit-for-commercial-use-of-autonomous-vehicles-in-california
(REUTERS) - ROBOTICS company Nuro on Wednesday received the first-ever permit to commercially deploy its self-driving vehicles in California, allowing the Silicon Valley firm to charge clients for its driverless delivery service.
Relying on a remote human operator - who could control multiple autonomous vehicles from miles away - is a step that allows a path to profitability in the emerging field of self-driving technology.
Nuro has been testing autonomous vehicles on California's roads with safety drivers since 2017, and it was authorized by the state regulators to test two driverless delivery vehicles in nine cities earlier this year.
The company said it would launch a delivery service with a fleet of autonomous Toyota Priuses, and later add its own low-speed R2 vehicle, which has no pedals or steering wheel and only room for packages.
Last month, Nuro raised $500 million in a funding round, driven by a massive boost to e-commerce from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nuro, a privately held firm based in Mountain View, California, was permitted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in February to deploy up to 5,000 low-speed electric delivery vehicles in Houston without human controls such as mirrors and steering wheels.
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>>> Stripe chases $100bn valuation with no sign of IPO
FinTech Futures
by Ruby Hinchliffe
1st December 2020
https://www.fintechfutures.com/2020/12/stripe-chases-100bn-valuation-with-no-sign-of-ipo/
Stripe, with its last private valuation standing at $36 billion, is reportedly chasing a new valuation of up to $100 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Co-founded by Irish brothers, Patrick and John Collison, Stripe could see its valuation quadruple in just two years.
Its latest funding round – the value of which is yet to be disclosed – follows a $600 million funding round just seven months ago. Stripe’s total money raised to date is almost $2 billion, according to PitchBook data.
But Stripe is still a private company, and there is no talk of it holding an initial public offering (IPO) – prompting speculation that the brothers, worth $4.3 billion each, are putting it off.
The company did, however, hire Dhivya Suryadevara – formerly General Motors – as its new chief financial officer (CFO) this year.
A crazy valuation?
At $100 billion, that would make Stripe the most valuable venture-backed start-up in the US, according to CB Insights.
Axios points out that Chinese firm, ByteDance’s divestment of its majority stake in TikTok had cleared on Friday, which paves the way for Stripe to be a record-breaker.
It is possible that the latest funding won’t happen, or that it will happen, but at a lower valuation.
Regardless, there is logic behind such an inflated valuation for the payments processing software provider.
COVID-19 has caused e-commerce sales to skyrocket, seeing Stripe benefit from the industry’s anticipated 20% growth in 2020. That’s according to IBM’s US Retail Index.
But it’s clear there’s still major room for growth too. Forbes quoted two years ago that less than 10% of global commerce happens online.
Which is why Stripe has since bought Nigerian company, Paystack, for $200 million. It also led a $12 million round for Manila-based PayMongo.
And as its public competitors – Square, PayPal, and Ayden among them – are seeing their stocks as much as double and triple this year, it’s unsurprising that Stripe’s value is in turn driven up.
This year has also continued the trend of Stripe not only serving start-ups, but also working with enterprise industry names.
Zoom, Just Eat, media group NBC and toy-maker Mattel all made the list of new clients. They join the likes of Amazon, Salesforce, Lyft and Instacart.
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>>> Early Warning Services is known throughout the financial services industry as a leader in fraud prevention and risk management. We provide our customers with fraud and risk management tools through collaboration and sharing of information within the industry.
Early Warning is a limited liability company owned by Bank of America, BB&T, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Those financial institutions - as well as hundreds of others across the country - exchange information and knowledge to obtain a single view of fraud activity across the enterprise and manage fraud on a cross-institution basis.
Early Warning facilitates this secure exchange between these organizations and offers solutions for responding quickly to evolving fraud challenges.
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https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/early-warning-services?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=profile_cta&utm_campaign=yahoo_finance
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/200-banks-credit-unions-live-140000271.html
>>> Pine Gate Renewables plans and builds small utility-scale solar farms that generate clean renewable power for the communities in which they are located. They position their farms near existing utility connection points, and they thoroughly vet their solar farmland to ensure minimum environmental impact. <<<
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/pine-gate-renewables
>>> Pattern Energy Group LP is an American company that develops, owns and operates utility scale wind and solar power facilities in the United States, Canada, and Japan. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California with an operations center in Houston, Texas. <<<
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/digital-realty-adds-renewable-energy-103000186.html
Sierra Nevada Corp - >>> Meet 'Tenacity': 1st Dream Chaser space plane gets a name
Space.com
By Nola Taylor Redd
8-12-20
Tenacity is scheduled to launch for the first time in late 2021.
The first orbital Dream Chaser space plane recently got its wings, and a name.
Dream Chaser, which is built by Colorado-based company Sierra Nevada Corp., is the world's only non-capsule private orbital spacecraft. The winged vehicle will launch vertically atop a rocket but end its missions with runway landings, like NASA's now-retired space shuttle orbiters used to do.
This spring, the company unboxed the wings for the first operational Dream Chaser vehicle, bringing it one step closer to delivering supplies and science to and from the International Space Station. Sierra Nevada also announced the spacecraft's name: Tenacity.
This reporter had the opportunity to visit Sierra Nevada's Louisville, Colorado, production facility in March to get a sneak peek at the space plane. At that time, Tenacity's wings remained boxed up, but the space plane was still a sight to behold.
"It's an SUV for space — a Space Utility Vehicle," said Kimberly Schwandt, Sierra Nevada's communications director.
Tenacity is scheduled to launch for the first time in late 2021, aboard a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Once it's up and running, the space plane will carry cargo to and from the space station for NASA. Dream Chaser's runway landings will allow efficient retrieval and removal of scientific gear coming back to Earth, which will also enjoy a relatively smooth ride down to the ground, Sierra Nevada representatives said.
"The gentle landing protects science," Schwandt said.
Tenacity of flight
Dream Chaser was originally designed to carry people, and Sierra Nevada won several rounds of funding from NASA's Commercial Crew Program to develop the vehicle. However, the company lost out to Boeing and SpaceX when NASA awarded astronaut-ferrying contracts in 2014.
But in 2016, NASA selected the space plane for its Commercial Resupply Services 2 contract, awarding Sierra Nevada a contract to fly six uncrewed cargo missions to the space station by 2024.
Sierra Nevada needed to change out only about 20% of Dream Chaser's module to transition from a passenger vehicle to a cargo plane, said Anna Hare, a company communications representative.
Sierra Nevada therefore hasn't ruled out a crew-carrying future for the space plane at some point. "To go back to a crew ship wouldn't be so hard," Hare said.
Dream Chaser by itself can carry roughly 2,000 lbs. (900 kilograms) of supplies and cargo on board. A 16-foot-tall (4.9 meters) cargo module called Shooting Star can be attached to the space plane to provide an additional 10,000 lbs. (4,500 kg) of carrying capability.
After cargo is loaded onto the space station, astronauts can fill the Shooting Star with their trash. As Tenacity re-enters Earth's atmosphere, the Shooting Star will detach and disintegrate.
Because Dream Chaser carries relatively safe propellant, technicians can approach it quickly after landing. The back of the plane opens, providing rapid access to precious cargo. That can be key when the cargo is science experiments meant to operate in the low gravity of space.
"When the capsule sits on Earth, you kind of lose science," Schwandt said.
The space plane itself flies fully automated, without the requirement of a human pilot. My recent tour revealed a simulated cockpit that allowed technicians to practice handling the plane, as well as flying it.
According to Hare, Tenacity's initial flight most likely won't be full, giving the space plane a chance to stretch its wings. "But after that, we intend to fill the whole vehicle up with cargo," she said.
Eventually, Sierra Nevada would like to have more Dream Chasers join Tenacity in traveling to and from space. However, expanding the number of operational space planes depends on customer demand.
"Our dream is to have a whole fleet of space planes," Schwandt said.
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Fluence Bioengineering -
https://www.bghydro.com/fluence-bioengineering.html
>>> LED Grow Lights Designed For Commercial Horticulture
Fluence Bioengineering LED-based lighting systems are designed to provide high levels of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) ideal for commercial cultivation and research applications from microgreens to cannabis. From sole-source indoor grow lighting to supplemental greenhouse lighting, we custom tailor our light spectrum and form-factors to optimize plant growth and increase yields while consuming less energy and reducing operating costs versus legacy technologies.
Built To The Highest Standards
All of our LED-based grow lights are built in the United States and ship globally. Our manufacturing process includes a combination of state-of-the-art robotics and hand-assembly at our headquarters in Austin, TX. At Fluence Bioengineering, our grow lights are ETL listed, DLC qualified and come with a 3-year or optional 5-year warranty. Learn more Increase Revenue.
Increase Consistency. Decrease Operating Costs
Our commercial LED grow lights are designed around three financial drivers to help our clients achieve their cultivation and business objectives: increase revenue per square foot, reduce operating costs per pound of finished product, and deliver consistent, high quality, year-round crop production.
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>>> Trianni, Inc. is a privately held biotech company specializing in antibody discovery technology. TRIANNI’s lead technology, the Trianni Mouse®, is a powerful, next-generation platform enabling efficient generation of fully-human monoclonal antibodies. TRIANNI’s transgenic platform leverages a novel approach to design made possible by advances in DNA synthesis and genomic modification technology. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Additional information about TRIANNI is available through its corporate website, www.trianni.com.
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80 Acres Farm -
https://www.80acresfarms.com/?cn-reloaded=1
>>> Palantir Technologies Files to Go Public
The data start-up, which has a valuation of $20 billion, would be the largest Silicon Valley tech listing since Uber made its debut last year.
Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir Technologies, founded the data company in 2003 with the investor Peter Thiel and others.
NY Times
By Erin Griffith
July 6, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/technology/palantir-technologies-ipo.html#:~:text=SAN%20FRANCISCO%20%E2%80%94%20Palantir%20Technologies%2C%20a,made%20its%20debut%20last%20year.
SAN FRANCISCO — Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley data start-up, said on Monday that it had filed to go public, setting up one of the largest public listings of a technology start-up since Uber made its debut last year.
Palantir is one of the tech industry’s most valuable private companies, with a valuation of $20 billion. Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Nathan Gettings, Stephen Cohen and Alex Karp, who is its chief executive, the company began working with governments, law enforcement and the defense industry to analyze and process their data, but has expanded into other areas.
Palantir has attracted more than $3 billion in venture capital funding from investors including In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency; Founders Fund, Mr. Thiel’s investment firm; Fidelity; and Tiger Global Management.
Despite persistent speculation about its prospects as a public company, Palantir had avoided listing its shares, in part because of the secretive nature of its business. A public listing would reveal a fuller picture of Palantir’s work, particularly with government agencies, for the first time.
“The minute companies go public, they are less competitive,” Mr. Karp said in 2014.
More recently, Palantir has taken steps to prepare for a listing. California requires companies to have one woman on their boards in order to go public, and in June, Palantir added its first, Alexandra Wolfe Schiff, a former Wall Street Journal reporter. Spencer Rascoff, a tech executive, and Alexander Moore, an early Palantir employee, joined the board as well.
If completed, the listing will be part of a wave of tech initial public offerings. New offerings had dried up in recent months because of volatility caused by the coronavirus pandemic. But in June, with the stock market booming again and some companies in a position to benefit from changes in consumer behavior, the I.P.O.s came back in full force.
Shares of recent listings have soared. Last week, shares of Lemonade, an insurance start-up, more than doubled on their first day of trading. Investors also embraced the I.P.O.s of the car sales start-up Vroom and the sales software company ZoomInfo.
Airbnb, the $31 billion home rental platform, whose business has been pummeled by the lack of travel during the pandemic, has also not ruled out going public this year.
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>>> Intelligent Growth Solutions Ltd (IGS), the Scottish-based indoor AgriTech and Commercial Lighting business, announced today a further raise of £1.6 million in the second and final close of its Series A funding.
https://www.intelligentgrowthsolutions.com/intelligent-growth-solutions-attracts-further-us-agritech-investment-to-scotland/
Intelligent Growth Solutions Ltd (IGS), the Scottish-based indoor AgriTech and Commercial Lighting business, announced today a further raise of £1.6 million in the second and final close of its Series A funding. The £1.5 million received from globally established agri-investor Ospraie Ag Science (OAS), coupled with an additional £100k from Agfunder, brings IGS’s total Series A fundraise to £7 million.
Ospraie Ag Science (New York City) joins existing Series A investors S2G Ventures (Chicago), the most active agri-foodtech investor globally in 2018; online venture capital firm AgFunder (San Francisco); and the Scottish Investment Bank in the investment round.
Ospraie brings 25 years of agriculture investing experience to IGS, and its investment in the company is its first step towards building a global platform in the indoor AgriTech market.
Dwight Anderson, Chief Investment Officer at Ospraie Ag Science commented: “IGS has tremendous potential to transform the way food is produced and supplied, and our investment – Ospraie’s first in the indoor agriculture market and in Scotland – is a testament to our strong belief in the success of IGS’ technology. The benefits of IGS’s Vertical Farming align well with our mission of helping farmers do more with less. We look forward to leveraging our significant agriculture network to help IGS grow its business to meet the market’s demand for sustainable solutions.”
This latest raise allows IGS to further expand its market presence through global sales operations for both AgriTech and Commercial Lighting. Demands for its systems are high with the first deployments expected in early 2020.
IGS Chief Executive Officer David Farquhar said: “The further investment of £1.6 million is a hugely exciting one, not only for our business, but also for the Scottish economy. Ospraie has chosen IGS as its initial investment target in the indoor agriculture market, and also as its first investment in Scotland, which is a substantial endorsement of our technology and approach to date. Working alongside our other investors in this Series A funding we are in a really strong position to take our offering to a global market and meet the demand that is growing almost daily.
“The pressures of climate change are real and clear and our technology and systems have the ability to play a part in addressing how we produce and supply food sustainably and productively all over the world. Our customers in the commercial property world are equally keen to adopt IOT-enabled smart lighting to create better indoor climates for their tenants and visitors alike.”
IGS has designed all its products to be highly pragmatic, flexible, modular and scalable in line with market expectations.
Sanjeev Krishnan, Managing Director of S2G Ventures said: “We are excited to partner again with Dwight and the Ospraie team. IGS will benefit greatly from the Ospraie insights, networks and entrepreneurial vision in building scaled businesses in the outdoor sector. Indoor Ag is set up to grow considerably and we are excited about IGS’ role in that effort.”
Michael Dean, founding partner at AgFunder commented: “We are delighted to see our friends at Ospraie join us as investors in IGS. We look forward to working with the Ospraie team to ensure that the game-changing IGS technology is rolled out to Controlled Environment Agriculture project developers globally.”
Kerry Sharp, Director, Scottish Investment Bank, said: “Intelligent Growth Solutions has made good progress recently. This latest investment is testament to the hard work and vision of the management team and will help the company as it takes its technology to the global marketplace. A company like IGS securing three international investors in Ospraie, S2G and AgFunder goes a long way to highlight the strength of opportunities available for Investors outside Scotland looking to invest in innovative Scottish companies. We look forward to continuing the journey with the company through our investment and our Scottish Enterprise account management service.”
The Scottish-led R&D team at IGS has developed, patented and productised a breakthrough, IoT-enabled power and communications platform consisting of patented electrical, electronic and mechanical technologies as well as the world’s most sophisticated ventilation system. All this is managed by a SaaS and data platform using AI to deliver economic and operational benefits to indoor environments across the globe.
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>>> Bowery Farming is growing crops in warehouses to create food like customized kale
CNBC
JUN 1 2018
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/24/bowery-farming-growing-crops-in-warehouses.html
Bowery Farming is using robotics and software to raise crops in warehouses outside of big cities.
Jose Andres, Carla Hall and David Barber are among the star chefs who have invested in Bowery’s indoor farming venture.
The U.N. projects that by 2050, food production will need to increase by about 60 percent to feed the growing global population.
This high-tech farm is 100 times more productive than a square foot of farmland
A start-up called Bowery Farming is putting an urban twist on agriculture, raising leafy greens and herbs in a high-tech warehouse a few miles outside of New York City, and celebrity chefs are starting to invest.
Using a mix of software, cameras, lights and robotics, Bowery can control precisely how plants grow. CEO and co-founder Irving Fain says chefs love the company’s systems because they allow Bowery to make customized ingredients for them, giving kale a softer leaf or arugula a more peppery taste, for example.
According to Fain, 1 square foot within one of these indoor farms is 100 times more productive than 1 square foot of arable land.
CNBC took a look inside of the company’s first farm in New Jersey with investor and celebrity chef Carla Hall, who is the Emmy-winning co-host of “The Chew” on ABC. “I visited the farm and tasted the food,” she said. “It moved from a concept and an idea that is sustainable to deliciousness.”
Today, the company grows and sells its own brand of baby kale, butterhead lettuce, arugula, mixed kales and basil. Some are available in and around New York including at Whole Foods markets, and restaurants Craft and Temple. Both are run by Tom Colicchio, also an investor.
Fain thinks of Bowery’s food as “post-organic.”
“We grow with no pesticides, herbicides or insecticides, no agrochemicals at all,” he said. “And we’re able to grow 365 days a year, independent of weather.”
Bowery isn’t alone in its mission to feed the world without using as much water, energy or chemicals, to raise crops. Other indoor farming innovators like Plenty, AeroFarms and Freight Farms have also attracted venture capital.
Especially because the planet has lost a third of its arable land in the past 40 years, Fain said he welcomes all players in sustainable agriculture. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization projects that by 2050, food production will need to increase by about 60 percent to feed the growing global population.
Bowery has raised $27.5 million in venture funding to build its indoor farms across the U.S. and to sell produce grown there to select restaurants and groceries.
Investors in Bowery include Alphabet’s venture arm GV, General Catalyst, GGV and First Round Capital. But the company more recently attracted funding from a long list of culinary icons including Hall, Colicchio and Jose Andres.
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>>> Gotham Greens is an American urban agricultural company founded in New York City that grows produce year-round in greenhouses, sold locally under its brand name. The company owns and operates eight greenhouse facilities in the United States.
Gotham Greens was founded by Viraj Puri and Eric Haley in 2008, aiming to bring fresh, local and pesticide-free vegetables, grown using ecologically sustainable methods, to urban areas.[1] Puri has a sustainable development and environmental engineering background, and Haley has a banking and finance background and focuses on the business side of the venture. The company is headed by Puri, Haley and Jennifer Nelkin-Frymark, who joined in 2009 to lead greenhouse operations.
After three years of planning, in May 2011 Gotham Greens opened its first location, a 15,000 square-foot greenhouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The company opened its second location in 2013, a 20,000 square-foot greenhouse, atop a Whole Foods Market in Gowanus, Brooklyn; its third in 2015, a 75,000 square foot greenhouse in Chicago, Illinois, the largest rooftop greenhouse in the world; and its fourth location, a 60,000 square-foot greenhouse in Jamaica, Queens, in late 2015. Its produce is packaged and sold in local stores under the Gotham Greens brand name, and also sold to local restaurants.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotham_Greens
QuantumScape, Sila Nanotechnology, Solid Power -
>>> The Electric Car Battery Boom Has Screeched to a Halt, For Now
Bloomberg
by David Stringer and Akshat Rathi
June 17, 2020
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/electric-car-battery-boom-screeched-211515316.html
The Electric Car Battery Boom Has Screeched to a Halt, For Now
(Bloomberg) -- Three decades of advances took lithium-ion batteries from powering handheld Sony camcorders to propelling Tesla’s popular electric vehicles. The rapid rise is facing a major test in the Covid-19 pandemic.
Demand for rechargeable batteries will decline for the first time this year, as sales of electric cars—the biggest user—slump with novel coronavirus pummeling the auto industry, according to BloombergNEF forecasts. Battery shipments to carmakers are forecast to fall 14% in 2020, and the effects of the slowdown are seen lingering into next year.
Major producers, including South Korea’s LG Chem Ltd., a supplier to Tesla Inc. and General Motors Co., have cut annual sales forecasts. Analysts expect the industry’s planned vast expansion of manufacturing capacity to slow down. Startups burning through cash as they work on potential breakthrough technologies are bracing for a tougher sell to secure funds.
And yet, from Silicon Valley laboratories to China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., the world’s top producer, optimism over the lithium-ion battery’s longer-term outlook is undimmed. Batteries, say automakers and utility companies, are still on track to become more powerful, cheaper and ubiquitous, not just in passenger vehicles, but also in additional forms of transport, consumer electronics and large-scale energy storage.
Despite short-term pressures, Zeng Yuqun, chairman of CATL, said there is “great confidence in the long-run.” In less than a decade, his company has grown to lead its industry: CATL’s sales rose 90% in 2019, according to BloombergNEF.
Lithium-ion battery demand has more than doubled since 2015 and remains on track for about a ninefold expansion from last year to the end of the decade. The sector is also forecast to keep lowering costs. Battery prices plunged 87% in the past 10 years, pushing plug-in electric cars to near sticker-price parity with gas guzzlers.
The pandemic might even prove to be an opportunity, with at least some governments, including those of Germany and France, using virus recovery funds to help accelerate a transition from internal combustion engines to battery-powered alternatives. France will offer about 8 billion euros ($9 billion) to its auto sector to bolster support for electric vehicles; Germany’s stimulus package includes about 5.6 billion euros for the sector and will require gas stations to install charging units. “This is a historic plan to confront a historic situation,” French President Emmanuel Macron said on May 26.
There are other sources of optimism. Volkswagen AG on June 16 announced an additional investment of $200 million in QuantumScape Corp., a battery technology startup founded by former Stanford University researchers, after committing $100 million in 2018. In May, the carmaker became the biggest shareholder of Chinese battery producer Guoxuan High-Tech Co. Ltd.
“The train’s left the station on both renewable power generation and electric vehicles, and no one is going to put that train in reverse,” said Jeff Chamberlain, chief executive officer of Volta Energy Technologies, a Chicago-based fund focused on energy investments. Chamberlain previously led energy storage initiatives at the Argonne National Laboratory, the U.S. government facility seen as having been pivotal in the transfer of battery technology from academia to the auto sector.
Battery makers also are quickly making progress on three key fronts: battery life, power and cost. CATL recently announced it will soon begin production on a battery that can operate for 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles), or about 16 years. The capability puts it far ahead of any of the batteries on the market today, which typically are under warranty for about 150,000 miles, Zeng said.
Tesla and GM are each developing batteries that can last a million miles. Neither have yet said exactly when they’ll be ready. GM is “almost kind of there on longer life,” Doug Parks, an executive vice president, said at a May 19 Citigroup Inc. event. The car maker is “experiencing nearly that in some of our products today,” Parks said.Combustion engine vehicles are currently scrapped in the U.S. after about 200,000 miles, Tesla said in a June 8 report, meaning a longer-life battery pack could dramatically extend a car’s lifespan, particularly useful for taxis or delivery trucks. More important, a million-mile pack could be resold by a consumer to be deployed in a second vehicle, offsetting some of the initial purchase price.
Tesla is planning to provide further details on its battery innovations in the coming weeks at what it’s billing as a “battery day” investor seminar. It had tentatively been scheduled for April but was delayed on account of Covid-19 travel concerns and restrictions.
One critical update investors are expecting: the average cost of batteries used in Tesla’s various models. The carmaker’s numbers typically set the standard for others to catch up to, and the car battery still accounts for about 30% of the total cost of an electric vehicle. Better technology and rapid growth in manufacturing capacity has already sent the price of lithium-ion batteries tumbling, down from more than $1,000 a kilowatt hour to an average of $156/kWh at the end of 2019, according to BNEF.
An industry average battery price of $100/kWh, should be achieved in 2024, BNEF analyst James Frith said at a seminar in May, leading to price parity between electric cars and combustion engine vehicles. Additional savings through 2030 will lower costs further, though they’ll prove harder to achieve and will depend on additional advancements and new technology, according to Frith.Every battery has three key components: two electrodes, cathode and anode, with an electrolyte—usually a liquid—to allow the battery to charge and discharge.A key, pending breakthrough will be the addition of silicon into battery anodes in place of graphite. California’s Sila Nanotechnology Inc., which counts Daimler AG among its investors, says the silicon will help make a single charge last at least 20% longer.
The technology is being applied to consumer devices that are due to hit the market next year, said Sila CEO Gene Berdichevsky. There’s also potential for the technology to make its way into some supercars or luxury vehicles as early as 2023—and mainstream vehicles after that, Berdichevsky said. “There's now more engineering resources at the battery makers that we work with,'' he said. “There's more capacity on the production line to try new things."A more significant advance could be achieved before the end of the decade via the commercialization of solid-state lithium-ion batteries for regular cars. Such a development would enable smaller battery packs, reducing safety risks and dramatically improving energy density, allowing cars to travel much further on a single charge.
Solid-state technology does away with the liquid electrolyte, replacing it with a material such as ceramic, glass or polymer. Toyota Motor Corp., the leader in development of the technology, is on track for commercialization in the first half of this decade, the company said.Colorado-based Solid Power Inc. has started shipping its solid-state batteries to prospective customers in the auto industry for testing. The startup is likely to face a challenges in securing funding, while its products go through the years-long process of verification. The batteries won’t be available for purchase before 2025, if the company is able to navigate through the current economic downturn.
“I’d be lying if I said raising capital in the near term is not going to be challenging,” said Doug Campbell, Solid Power’s CEO.
Those able to withstand short-term pressures should benefit from a demand wave that’ll make about 31% of the world’s passenger cars—about 500 million—battery-powered by 2040, according to BNEF.
There’s also rapid growth coming from two-wheelers such as motorbikes and scooters, as well as in large-scale energy storage. Above Moses Lake, Washington, last month, the maiden flight of a converted, all-electric Cessna plane pointed to an additional potential source of demand.It’s a long-term outlook that’s offering the battery industry reassurance. With parts of California under shelter-in-place restrictions, the board of Sila Nanotechnology, which includes General Electric Co.’s financial crisis-era leader Jeff Immelt, met last month via videoconference to consider how best to handle a pandemic-led downturn.“They said: Keep going, be thoughtful in your investments, but keep investing,’’ Berdichevsky said. “Now is not the time to stop.”
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Eviation - >>> Electric Planes to Debut for Airline Serving Nantucket, Vineyard
Bloomberg
By Tara Patel
June 18, 2019
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-18/electric-plane-maker-eviation-clinches-first-customer-cape-air
Israeli venture-backed aircraft maker predicts supply crunch
‘We’re talking to everyone’ on future sales, Eviation CEO says
EVIATION AIRCRAFT (EVTNF)
Electric-plane company Eviation Aircraft Ltd., which just signed up its first customer, predicts that in a few years it may not be able to keep up with orders.
“We’ll have a supply issue, not a demand issue,” Chief Executive Officer Omer Bar-Yohay said in an interview at the Paris Air Show. The founder of the Israeli venture capital-backed developer said U.S. regional airline Cape Air has agreed to buy a “double-digit” number of planes. The carrier flies some 88 Cessna turbo-props on routes such as Boston to Martha’s Vineyard and New York to Nantucket.
Eviation was showcasing a prototype, transported in pieces to the biennial exhibition, and is “talking to everyone” about future sales, said Bar-Yohay. Prospective customers include major U.S. carriers like United Continental Holdings Inc. and JetBlue Airways Corp., which are interested in planes to feed hubs, he said.
Eviation’s plane, the Alice, is one of a host of electric models at the design stage, and its nine-passenger capacity and 650-mile range from a single charge could give it an edge in the commuter market, currently served by a variety of light aircraft. Interest in electric planes is growing as the aviation industry comes under criticism for increasing emissions of greenhouse gases.
Read: Stratospheric: What Happens to Airline Emissions Under Self-Rule
Eviation is planning a first flight later this year in the U.S., followed by the assembly of more planes in Arizona and Washington state and certification around 2021.
“We’re a bit ahead of the pack but I have no doubt others are coming,” Bar-Yohay said, adding that taking on a customer like Cape Air will also entail developing charging and maintenance infrastructure.
“The hurdles aren’t just about getting the plane out the door, but everything else that goes with them,” he said. “We need an environment to support the plane and trained engineers and mechanics.”
Aircraft Economics
Eviation contends its plane makes economic sense: Running costs for the Alice will be about $200 per flight hour versus $1,000 for a turboprop. The Alice will be slower than some conventional craft, with a cruising speed of 240 knots (276 miles per hour), half the pace of modern business jets but not far short of some turboprop models.
The company is targeting “middle mile” commutes like Paris to Toulouse, Oslo to Trondheim in Norway and San Jose to San Diego.
Read: Airbus May Make the Next Version of Top-Selling Jet a Hybrid
Based in Kadima, near Tel Aviv, Eviation was founded in 2015 by a team of aviation and technology specialists. It’s one of about 100 different electric-aircraft programs in development worldwide, up 30% since 2017, according to Roland Berger, a consulting firm.
Zunum Aero, backed by Boeing Co. and JetBlue, aims to bring a hybrid-electric commuter model to market by 2022, while MagniX Technologies Pty is developing a propulsion system for an all-electric plane with a similar date in mind. In September, it announced a successful ground test of a 350-horsepower motor attached to the nose section of a Cessna test rig.
Joby Aviation Inc. is aiming smaller, targeting the air-taxi market with a plane that would carry four passengers, travel 150 miles and fly at a few thousand feet. Unlike the Alice, it wouldn’t be pressurized. Uber Technologies Inc. has said it’s also working on a flying taxi as an extension of its ride-sharing product that would take off and land vertically and reach the market by 2023.
At the other end of the scale, Easyjet Plc has partnered with U.S.-based Wright Electric to develop a full-sized battery-powered airliner within a decade for flights of less than two hours, enough to link London with Paris or Amsterdam.
Siemens AG, Airbus SE and Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc are working on a hybrid-electric propulsion system, the E-Fan X, that would also power a relatively large aircraft. Roland Berger predicts that the first 50-seat hybrid airliner will enter fare-paying service by 2032.
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Carbon3D - >>> Investors are still embracing 3-D printing despite some big IPO misfires
MarketWatch
June 26, 2019
By Jon Swartz
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/3-d-printer-unicorn-carbon-lands-260-million-in-funding-despite-ipo-misfires-2019-06-25?siteid=bigcharts&dist=bigcharts
Venture capitalists have invested a record $650 million in 3-D Printers so far this year, as shares have plummeted
Carbon CEO Joe DeSimone just announced his company raised over $260 million in funding, giving it a valuation of $2.4 billion. In all, it has raised $680 million.
Investors can’t get enough of 3-D printing companies even though some of the sector’s biggest names are bleeding red ink.
Three-dimensional printing unicorn Carbon, a frequently mentioned IPO candidate, on Tuesday announced a new funding round of over $260 million, hiking its overall total to $680 million and giving it a valuation of $2.4 billion.
Madrone Capital Partners and investment management firm Baillie Gifford co-led the round, Carbon’s fifth since it was founded in 2013 and launched in 2015.
The hefty cash infusion highlights the thirst for 3-D printing companies despite a batch of discomfiting IPOs. Venture capitalists have invested at a record pace ($650 million) so far this year while shares have plummeted the past 12 months at Nano Dimension Ltd. ADR NNDM, -0.76% down 80%; Organovo Holdings Inc. ONVO, -0.43%, down 71%; SLM Solutions Group AG AM3D, -1.81%, down 68%; and at 3D Systems Corp. DDD, +1.88%, which is off 38%. There are some strong performers over the last year at Materialise N.V. ADR MTLS, -1.86%, up 27%; FARO Technologies Inc. FARO, +2.64%, 22%, and Stratasys Ltd. SSYS, +0.57%, up 15%.
Those numbers underscore the realities of at least 38 companies vying for a slice of a slowly evolving multibillion market. It takes time for manufacturers to “rethink and change the fundamental design of their products” through 3-D printing, says Forrester analyst Carl Doty.
HP Inc. HPQ, +5.70%, the biggest name in industrial 3-D printing, just opened a 150,000-square-foot facility in Barcelona, the largest 3-D printing and digital manufacturing R&D center in the world. It recently expanded its partnership with SmileDirectClub to 3D print more than 50,000 mouth molds per day -- nearly 20 million in the next year. HP does not break out revenue for 3-D printing, which is part of its $21 billion printer division.
As for the weak performance of many publicly traded 3-D printer companies, investors are hardly fazed. To date, $3 billion has been invested into 3-D technology, Doty says.
Investors such as Jim Goetz, a partner at Sequoia Capital, are willing to ply money into Carbon because of what they call its hybrid business approach. “Carbon has pioneered a business model in a market that hasn’t changed in decades,” Goetz told MarketWatch. “Most major hardware makers offer a one-time purchase of equipment that depreciates over the life of the product, with annual licensing fees.”
Carbon has lined up customers such as Ford Motor Co. F, +11.72%, Adidas AG (DE: ADS), and dental labs, who sign 3-, 5-, and 7-year subscription deals to use either a high-end printer that carries a $200,000 annual subscription fee, or a basic printer, at $70,000 a year.
“We have a sound, predictable business model,” Carbon co-founder and CEO Joe DeSimone told MarketWatch. The multiyear deals around allows Carbon to “lock in” 70% of revenue on Jan. 1, he added.
The Silicon Valley company has focused on three markets: foam replacements for Adidas ADS, +4.19% shoes and Riddell football helmets; creating crowns, bridges, and dentures for dental labs; and new markets in automotive. (In February, Carbon announced a partnership with Riddell to produce the first-ever digitally printed helmet liner. In January, Ford announced the first digitally manufactured polymer parts on production vehicles for the F-150, and Ford Mustang, and replacement parts for the Ford Focus.)
Carbon plans to use its new round of capital to expand research and development efforts, and fuel growth in Europe and Asia.
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Lucid Motors - >>> Electric Cars Are About to Start Rolling Out of the Arizona Desert
Lucid Motors expects to start car production by year-end.
Bloomberg
By Edward Ludlow
May 22, 2020
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-22/electric-cars-are-about-to-start-rolling-out-of-the-arizona-desert
On the outskirts of a small town less than 50 miles southeast of Phoenix, a 720,000 square foot electric vehicle factory is arising in the desert. If all goes as planned, a luxurious new battery-electric sedan will roll off its production line by year’s end.
Lucid Motors, a U.S. startup backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, is building the factory and slated to start manufacturing its debut model later this year for delivery in early 2021. Lucid says construction has stayed on schedule at a time when other automakers have been forced to halt output and delay key models due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Through a series of logistical maneuvers, help from parts suppliers and a bit of good fortune, Lucid executives say they’ve been able to move forward with installation of critical assembly-line equipment such as robotic arms and precision tools including stamping presses and jigs.
“It was luck. I must say that,” Peter Hochholdinger, Lucid’s vice president of manufacturing, said in an interview.
A big contribution of good karma has come from location. Arizona did not prohibit construction work along with much of the rest of the U.S. starting in March. After completing the steel structure in February, Lucid finished the exterior walls and roofing and recently has taken delivery of production equipment from suppliers including Hokuto, a parts-mounting device maker. Equipment manufacturers based in Asia were quick to reopen after Japan, China and South Korea allowed businesses to resume operations.
Lucid hasn’t entirely avoided virus-related snags. Its paint-shop equipment supplier Durr Systems initially planned to complete its work for the facility at a manufacturing site in China. When that government imposed its shutdown, the job shifted to a Durr site in Mexico. After businesses then began to shut down in North America, the company reverted back to China, which had lifted restrictions. Hochholdinger said all this caused only minimal delay.
Suppliers also diverted resources to Lucid from other automakers that had to pause projects in the midst of virus shutdowns, Chief Executive Officer Peter Rawlinson said in an email.
Even so, building a factory with 200 people on site at any given time has not been easy. To keep workers safe and construction moving forward, Lucid says it has implemented strict social-distancing and sanitation protocols. Workers are required to wear face masks and goggles at all times and multiple temperature checks are done at the site’s single point of entry using an infrared thermometer. Hochholdinger said any worker not wearing a mask or registering a temperature above 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) is asked to leave the site.
Virus-induced fevers aren’t the only potential hot spots. Temperatures can reach the high 90s in Casa Grande in May, so Lucid installed a cooling tent for workers to take breaks while maintaining distance.
Lucid trucked in 11.4 million pounds of steel and 67.4 million pounds of concrete. While the initial production volume the company is targeting is in the tens of thousands, the plant has been designed to eventually make as many as 380,000 vehicles. That’s more than the roughly 367,500 vehicles Tesla delivered last year, all of which were built at its plant in California.
Building from a bigger blueprint now will make it less costly for Lucid to expand in the future, Hochholdinger said. Initially, the general-assembly area and paint shop will be housed together, with a smaller building for the body shop. In the longer term, Lucid plans to move assembly to its own building and expand the paint shop using the vacated space.
Powertrain production is in a repurposed warehouse seven miles away from the main factory site. Hochholdinger said assembly of battery packs—using cells imported from LG Chem— won't require as much specialized equipment or bespoke installation, so the current arrangement is a cheaper, more straightforward option.
Lucid touts the operation as the first greenfield electric-vehicle site in the U.S. Tesla, by comparison, invested billions of dollars into what had been a joint-venture facility for Toyota and General Motors in Fremont, California.
While it was able to afford building from scratch, Lucid is still operating on a tight financial leash. The company received more than $1 billion from the Saudi fund in September 2018 and has not raised any additional money since. Hochholdinger credits a “nitpicky” finance team that requires justification for every purchase order with keeping the company within its budget. Rawlinson, the CEO, also has preached penny-pinching since taking the reins in April 2019.
In several interviews over the course of a year, Rawlinson, formerly the chief engineer of Tesla’s Model S, reiterated the money raised from Saudi Arabia’s PIF would be adequate to get Lucid through the factory build to the start of production.
The debut Air model, which is expected to sell for more than $100,000, can be ordered online, though buyers will be able to kick the tires at one of nine showrooms in the U.S. that Lucid plans to open this year in California and Florida. It has additional outlets slated for next year in Chicago, New York, Washington D.C. and Europe.
Prior to joining Lucid, Hochholdinger also was at Tesla as vice president of production in charge of the factory in Fremont. Before that, he spent 24 years at Audi and oversaw annual production of 400,000 cars at the peak of his career.
“It did teach me you can do things differently,” Hochholdinger says of his time at Tesla and Lucid. “You don't have to do 100% of the classic things car makers do.”
The city of Casa Grande agreed to reimburse $12.6 million of construction costs and contribute $1.5 million to Lucid’s training budget. The money will be paid if construction benefits local infrastructure and Lucid hires 1,114 full-time local workers, Craig McFarland, the city’s mayor, said in an email. Lucid has hired 733 workers so far, he said.
Arizona also offered $6.3 million in grants and $43.7 million in refundable tax credits if certain conditions are met. Lucid hasn't gotten any of these incentives yet because it hasn't met agreed-upon milestones, according to a spokeswoman for the Arizona Commerce Authority.
Lucid so far has avoided virus-related pitfalls other electric-vehicle startups have suffered. China’s Byton has furloughed half its California staff and delayed the start of vehicle production in China. Rivian Automotive, backed by Amazon and Ford Motor, also has delayed the start of production for its all-electric pickup and SUV.
Lucid says it has actually accelerated hiring, adding 120 new employees since mid-March, and is currently advertising 250 open positions. The company has not furloughed any of its employees or cut pay or hours, and it’s actively recruiting from competitors, Rawlinson said.
Lucid broke ground on the Casa Grande site in early December 2019, so construction could end up being completed within a year. Still, the company’s ramp-up will be slow. Hochholdinger said there will be 700 people working on production when the company's first car launches, a fraction of the more than 10,000 that Tesla employs at its factory in California.
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Ro, Vital Proteins, Byte - >>> Some wellness products growing ‘over 1,000%’ during pandemic: Ro CEO
by Emily McCormick
Yahoo Finance
May 23, 2020
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/some-wellness-products-growing-over-1000-during-pandemic-ro-ceo-131525580.html
The coronavirus pandemic accelerated a wellness renaissance among consumers as stay-in-place orders took effect, based on some of the sales trends seen by companies, including telehealth company Ro.
“Some of our allergy products are up 30%, all the way to smoking cessation, which is upwards of 100%, to some of our sleep products that are actually over 1,000% month-over-month growth,” Zachariah Reitano, Ro’s co-founder and CEO, said in an interview during Yahoo Finance Breakouts. “We’re seeing pretty incredible growth across the board.”
Ro, launched in 2017 by Reitano, Saman Rahmanian and Rob Schutz, began as a digital health clinic called Roman focused primarily on treating men’s health concerns including erectile dysfunction via virtual doctor visits.
The New York-based company now also includes Rory, a female-centric digital health-care clinic, along with Zero for smoking cessation and Plenity for weight management, and runs a prescription delivery program to ship generic medications to consumers.
[Read more: Telehealth is going to ‘become the default’ for consumers: Ro CEO]
The most recent jump in sales underscores shifting trends in both the kinds of wellness products consumers have sought out during the pandemic and the way in which consumers have been getting them – namely, through digital channels as opposed to in-person visits. It also extended a run-up in overall sales for the venture-backed company, with Ro’s company-wide revenues increasing 330% between 2018 and 2019 (though Reitano declined to provide dollar amounts).
Some of Ro's products grew 1,000% month on month in April, CEO Zachariah Reitano told Yahoo Finance.
Trends at other companies have also indicated a similarly turbo-charged shift toward wellness. The startup Vital Proteins, which makes collagen-supplemented powders, protein bars and capsules, saw demand rise more than 50% in the wake of the pandemic, and was already growing at a 100% year on year rate pre-outbreak, according to a recent Forbes report. The Santa Monica-based startup Byte, a teledentistry company that, like Ro, offers treatments without in-person doctors’ visits, saw first-quarter sales jump 1,000%, Bloomberg reported this month.
And it isn’t just startups that could be poised to reap the benefits. In a note in mid-May, Jefferies analyst Stephanie Wissink initiated coverage on WW (WW), the company former known as Weight Watchers, with a bullish Buy rating and said the “COVID-19 health crisis unlocked a durable trend” in which “wellness is being prioritized.” She estimated the “larger dialogue around wellbeing” implied a target addressable market for the consumer health marketplace of $300 billion.
Teladoc (TDOC), a publicly-traded competitor to Ro, said in its own quarterly results earlier late last month that it saw strong growth across all of its products, “not just general medicine,” CEO Jason Nathanial Gorevic said during a call with analysts. Business-to-business mental health and dermatology visits tripled in the quarter, Gorevic said, and the company overall reported a 92% surge in virtual visits during the first three months of the year.
And for Ro, April marked the company’s best for sales to date.
“In this instance, you have some companies whose revenue literally goes to zero or down 95%, unfortunately, and then you have others that are up 100%, 200%, 300%,” Reitano said.
“We would have hoped that people would be exposed to telemedicine by choice,” he added. “But right now, I think they've been exposed to it because they've been forced to, but are now seeing so many of the tremendous benefits that can come from it. And that has enabled our organization actually, to grow.”
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>>> Play These ETFs on Visa-Plaid Deal
Zacks
by Sanghamitra Saha
January 14, 2020
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/play-etfs-visa-plaid-deal-193007795.html
Visa Inc. V is set to take over U.S.-based fintech company Plaid in a deal worth $5.3 billion — almost double the start-up’s last private valuation. Plaid raised $250 million in a 2018 Series C funding round that set its valuation at $2.7 billion. The Visa-Plaid deal is expected to be finalized in the next three to six months, pending regulatory approval.
“Plaid’s API software lets start-ups connect to users’ bank accounts.” Plaid has been working with Venmo, a mobile payment service owned by PayPal PYPL, mobile investing app Robinhood and cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Gemini, per CNBC.
Plaid’s customer base doubled from 2017 to 2018 and has expanded to the U.K. and Canada, per CNBC. As of December 2019, Plaid said 25% people in the United States with bank accounts have connected to the fintech company through an app.
The start-up acquired Quovo two years ago to expand its presence beyond banking, and step into broader financial services and investments. The line of business makes it clear why Visa, which operates retail electronic payments networkglobally,chose Plaid as a compelling acquisition candidate.
Visa CEO said Plaid has been seeing a CAGR of about 100% since 2015. The deal would prepare Visa for the technological disruption in the next decade. Visa also expects the deal to inject as much as 100 basis points to net revenues by 2021.
Visa’s shares 0.81% on Jan 13 and also added gains after hours. However, Visa has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) and an ESP of -1.08%. The negative ESP lowers chances of a beat in the to-be-reported earnings, slated to be released on Jan 29.
Investors, who want to bet on the Visa-Plaid deal but are having second thoughts due to negative ESP, may play the below-mentioned Visa-heavy ETFs. A basket approach always minimizes stock-specific risks.
iShares U.S. Financial Services ETF (IYG)
Visa takes the second spot in the fund with about 9.79%. The fund has a Zacks Rank #3 (read: Should You Bet on Bank ETFs Before Earnings Release?).
ETFMG Prime Mobile Payments ETF (IPAY)
Visa takes the fourth position in the fund with about 6.05% exposure (read: ETFs to Invest in Mobile Payments and Drone Economy).
iShares U.S. Financials ETF (IYF)
The Zacks Rank #3 fund invests about 5.64% in the stock, taking the third position.
SPDR SSGA Gender Diversity Index ETF (SHE)
Visa takes the top spot in the fund with about 5.28% focus.
Technology Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLK)
The Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) fund puts 5.19% in Visa (read: Apple at All-Time High, Poised for an Upbeat Q1: ETFs to Benefit).
Invesco S&P 500 Quality ETF (SPHQ)
The fund invests about 5.14% in the stock (read: Should You Invest in Factor & Smart Beta ETFs?).
iShares Edge MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF (MTUM)
Visa takes the second spot in the fund, with about 5.14% exposure (read: Bet on These Momentum ETFs to Gain From Wall Street's Rally).
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>>> Lightsource Renewable Energy
Lightsource BP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightsource_Renewable_Energy
Type
Private company
Industry Solar power
Predecessor Lightsource Renewable Energy
Founder Nick Boyle
Headquarters London, United Kingdom
Key people
Nick Boyle (CEO)
Products Electric power
Services Development and operation of solar parks
Number of employees
~350
Parent BP
Website www.lightsourcebp.com
Lightsource BP, rebranded from Lightsource Renewable Energy in 2018, is the largest solar developer in Europe, and third largest in the world outside of China.[1][2] Lightsource BP is a British company with headquarters in London, and offices in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Mumbai, New Delhi, Cairo, Melbourne, Amsterdam, Bath, Belfast and Dublin
History
The company was founded in 2010 as Lightsource Renewable Energy.[citation needed] In 2011, the company's first solar park was established in Truro. It consists of more than 5,000 panels that can generate enough electricity to supply 430 homes in the area.[citation needed] In 2013, Lightsource completed a 5 MW rooftop solar PV installation at Bentley Motors' factory in Crewe.[3]
In 2016, the company launched Europe's largest floating solar project at the Queen Elizabeth II Reservoir, in Walton-on-Thames.[4]
In 2016, Lightsource completed the Crookedstone Solar Farm, in Antrim, Northern Ireland, which provides a third of the Belfast International Airport's electricity needs.[1]
In 2017, the company announced the establishment of teams in North America, the Netherlands and India.
In 2018, the company completed its first international installation, a 60MW solar farm in Maharashtra, India. Lightsource BP won the offtake contract through a competitive 450 MW tender process by the Government of India, managed by SECI. The project comprises 200,000 LONGi Solar photovoltaic panels ground-mounted across 240 acres. In that year Lightsource BP also announced they had signed a 25-year power purchase and asset acquisition agreement with Mid-Kansas Electric Company (Mid-Kansas) Inc, in Stanton County, Kansas, USA.
BP Partnership
In 2017, it was announced that BP will acquire a 43% stake in the company by investing $200 million. [5] The company was accordingly renamed Lightsource BP.[2]
Lightsource BP targets the growing demand for large-scale solar projects worldwide with a focus on grid-connected plants and corporate power purchase agreements (PPAs) signed with private companies. The company is largely focused in the Americas, India, Europe and the Middle East.
The company sees opportunities to create additional value through integrating solar with BP’s other businesses and trading capabilities as well as through BP’s international scale and relationships.
Joint Ventures
In 2018, Lightsource BP announced the formation of EverSource Capital, a partnership with Everstone Group to create a major fund management platform for green energy infrastructure in India. EverSource Capital, based in India and staffed by employees from both partners, manages funds targeting contracted power, distribution infrastructure and energy services in India.
The launch fund for EverSource Capital is the Green Growth Equity Fund (GGEF), which has a fundraising target of £500m and joint anchor investments from the UK Government and the India’s National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF), with a commitment of £120m each.
Later in 2018, the company announced another joint venture, this time in Egypt, with HA Utilities, the utilities arm of leading regional construction and engineering group Hassan Allam Holding (HAH). The venture, Lightsource BP Powered by Hassan Allam Utilities, is dedicated to funding, developing and operating solar projects locally and across the region.
Operations
As of 2018, Lightsource BP has commissioned 1.3 GW of solar capacity and manages about 2 GW of solar capacity. It plans to increase the capacity up to 8 GW through projects in the Americas, India, Europe and the Middle East.[6]
Alongside funding, developing, constructing and connecting solar installations across the globe, Lightsource BP provides Operations and Maintenance (O&M) and Asset Management services to solar asset owners in the UK and beyond.
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Unacast - >>> The Startup That Just Might Threaten Google
Unacast is out to change the world of advertising forever -- and it just might succeed.
By Jeremy GoldmanFounder and CEO, Firebrand Group
https://www.inc.com/jeremy-goldman/this-startup-wants-to-be-google-for-the-physical-world.html
Thomas Walle and Kjartan Slette started Unacast after coming to a major realization: that the average person spends 30% of their time in front of their phone and computer. But what about the other 70%?
We spend the rest of our waking hours in the "real world" - the offline space. Advertisers spend so much effort trying to understand consumers' behaviors during the time we spend with our devices; shouldn't we also be spending more time understanding consumer behavior everywhere else? "There needs to be a way to understand what people do in the real, real, real world," says Walle. For Unacast, that way forward involves sensors that track people's movement. Every time someone interacts with a sensor, they leave a footprint behind. These sensors have stories to tell, and advertisers to help.
In essence, Unacast ties together online and offline data in a way wasn't previously possible, and certainly not at scale. Targeted proximity communication, based on a very specific physical location, is used to give consumers very specific offers. Data generated from interaction with a beacon is able to deliver a target ad to a mobile or desktop device.
Unacast realized the value in standardizing what is, admittedly, a pretty fragmented market. There are already products deploying sensors, but each Proximity Solutions Provider (PSP) can only understand a fraction of the user's behavior. If Unacast is the company that is able to aggregate all this data, then they stand to have a better understanding than any individual player.
Jump to the present day, where Unacast now has partnerships with 66 of the largest PSPs that cover 2 million or 40% of the world's commercial beacons. A wealth of reputable adtech platforms have partnered with Unacast, including MediaMath, JUICE Mobile, Lotame, SITO Mobile, Blis, and Sense360. To state it plainly, that makes Unacast the largest aggregator of proximity data in the industry, and part of why Unacast has been able to attract $5 million in funding.
It's more than funding that's coming in to Unacast: awards are beginning to roll in as well. The company won best "Verticals & Marketplaces" for its Real World Graph™ platform product at the Location Search Association 2017 Ad to Action Awards in San Diego.
Unacast is used to provide more relevant & advertising online; that's how they provide value to end consumers.
The potential of proximity data is nearly endless - enough to make any advertiser drool.
With proximity data, you might have the ability to say a particular consumer was in this Dunkin' Donuts store for 15 minutes and target them accordingly. Eventually, we will even be able to track consumer behavior within the stores themselves.
While Unacast has plenty of work to do before it has conquered the advertising space, it has the ability to go after plenty of other applications down the line. How can Unacast make ecommerce experiences more relevant? How can it make retail analytics more relevant? How can it influence city planning? How can cities become smarter? These are all long-term possibilities for the 3-year old startup.
Of course, Unacast isn't without its challenges. For one: they need to educate prospects better about proximity data. "Our biggest competitor is the status quo," says Walle. Most people are familiar with geodata, which is information about geographic locations that is stored on a computer. Proximity data tracks the relationship between objects (which can be people, places or things) - in other words, it illustrates how people interact with the objects around them. Demonstrating how proximity data is different and why it has higher accuracy and a different ROI than geodata, is something that Unacast constantly has to show.
The other issue relates to the sheer number of players in the PSP space: there might be up to 400 already in existence. As a result, there's simply no industry standard. Moreover, Unacast has to make a deal with each proximity company individually - a lot of effort, but the flipside is that the rewards are commensurately huge.
Walle and Slette went to Copenhagen Business School around the time of Napster and as a result, spent plenty of time talking about how to save the music industry. The end result was WiMP, which was soon renamed Tidal and sold to Jay Z. By building that platform, Walle and Slette learned how to harmonize a plethora of disaggregated content all onto one platform. It's that experience that is proving incredibly useful as they build out Unacast.
Let's face it: there's been plenty of hype around the Internet of Things: the idea that everyday objects will communicate with one another and the Internet to provide better experiences. If Unacast plays its cards right, it has the potential to be the backend that powers many of these interactions.
"Someone needs to index the physical world," just like Google indexed the online world, says Walle. If history is any indication, the company that led the last revolution typically doesn't lead the next one. If anyone's going to play the part of the revolutionary, Unacast is making a strong case for itself.
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>>> Palantir Technologies is a private American software company that specializes in big data analytics. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, it was founded by Peter Thiel, Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Alex Karp. The company's name is derived from The Lord of the Rings: a palantír is an artifact used to communicate with or see faraway parts of the world.
The company is known for three projects in particular: Palantir Gotham, Palantir Metropolis and Palantir Foundry. Palantir Gotham is used by counter-terrorism analysts at offices in the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) and United States Department of Defense[4], fraud investigators at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, and cyber analysts at Information Warfare Monitor, while Palantir Metropolis is used by hedge funds, banks, and financial services firms.[5][6] Palantir Foundry is used by corporate clients such as Morgan Stanley, Merck KGaA, Airbus, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV.[7] Palantir's original clients were federal agencies of the USIC. It has since expanded its customer base to serve state and local governments, as well as private companies in the financial and healthcare industries.[8] Karp, Palantir's chief executive officer, announced in 2013 that the company would not pursue an IPO, as going public would make "running a company like ours very difficult".[9] However, on October 18, 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported that Palantir was considering an IPO in the first half of 2019 following a $41 billion valuation.[10]
The company was valued at $9 billion in early 2014, with Forbes stating that the valuation made Palantir "among Silicon Valley's most valuable private technology companies".[9] As of December 2014, Thiel was Palantir's largest shareholder.[9] In January 2015, the company was valued at $15 billion after an undisclosed round of funding with $50 million in November 2014.[11] This valuation rose to $20 billion in late 2015 as the company closed an $880 million round of funding.[3] Palantir has never reported a profit. In 2018, Morgan Stanley valued the company at $6 billion
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Skeleton Technologies - >>> Tesla Rival Sets Out to Banish 160-Year-Old Lead Tech From Cars
Bloomberg
By Ott Ummelas
February 22, 2020
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-23/tesla-rival-sets-out-to-banish-160-year-old-lead-tech-from-cars?srnd=premium
Skeleton Technologies bets on supercapacitors to help run cars
Elon Musk’s company has bought one of Skeleton’s competitors
Your sleek new Tesla Model S or electronic BMW has a distinctly 19th century feature that you may not be aware of, among its batteries. A company in Estonia wants to change that.
Skeleton Technologies Group OU is working on supercapacitors, light-weight and long-life components that can distribute intensive bursts of power. These may help eliminate lead-acid batteries, a piece of technology invented in 1859 that still lurks under the hoods of Teslas in addition to the main lithium-ion power source.
Supercapacitors have some way to go before they are widely adopted. There is still a gap with the popular lithium-ion units on how much energy they can store, Skeleton Chief Executive Officer Taavi Madiberk admits. Even so, the technology is promising for offering higher peak power output and reliability in extreme temperatures and Skeleton has already sold it to clients across the transport industry.
“Sometimes people think that lead is a problem of the past because it relates to internal combustion engines but in practice all electric vehicles have 12-volt lead acid batteries,” Madiberk said. “We are working on a viable alternative to replace all lead acid batteries.“
Musk’s PhD
Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk actually moved to Silicon Valley in the first place to do research on supercapacitors in his PhD studies at Stanford University, he wrote in a blog post in 2006. While Musk eventually dropped out from Stanford to start his new ventures, he hasn’t abandoned his bet on supercapacitors, also referred to as ultracapacitors.
Tesla, also searching for a breakthrough for electric car batteries, bought Skeleton’s competitor Maxwell Technologies Inc. last year. Musk’s company, like other manufacturers, still uses the relatively cheap and recyclable lead-acid battery in addition to the lithium-ion unit.
The sector is at a stage where the lithium-ion battery industry was around 1999, according to Madiberk, whose company also has a base in Germany. Back then, lithium-ion batteries cost over $5,000 per kilowatt hour, compared with under $200 now. Supercapacitors may similarly go from $5,000 to as low as $300, he said, without giving an exact timeline.
The technology may be useful for some tasks such as regenerating energy from braking, perhaps in conjunction with a lithium-ion unit, said James Frith, an analyst at BloombergNEF who focuses on energy storage. However, it’s only one of a number of available routes for the industry.
“There’s been a lot of interest in supercapacitors over the years,” Frith said. “The trouble is that lithium-ion batteries have been coming down in price quite rapidly.”
To replace lead-acid batteries, Skeleton is cooperating with some major European carmakers, Madiberk said, without disclosing names. Its products reach an energy density -- a key measure of performance -- of 60 watt-hours per kilogram, exceeding regular lead-acid batteries. Their raw material, a patented graphene composite, provides cost advantages in the long term not just compared with lead-acid but also lithium-ion batteries, he said.
Operating Profit
“If you look at the supplies of cobalt, lithium, nickel, manganese, then sooner or later with electrification we see significant bottlenecks,” Madiberk said. “The issue with lead is, of course, it’s toxic: the manufacturing process is environmentally harmful.”
In heavy transportation, Skeleton has supplied systems that recuperate the braking energy of trams made by Czech manufacturer Skoda Transportation AS and which reduce the fuel consumption of hybrid-electric buses made by the U.K.’s Wrights Group Ltd. Having signed orders totaling more than 150 million euros ($163 million) last year, the company targets revenue of 1 billion euros by 2025 when it sees its serviceable market reaching about 60 billion euros. It expects to reach a profit on the operating level by the end of next year.
Aside from Tesla, Madiberk lists U.S.-based AVX Corp. and China State Railway Group as key competitors. The raw materials Skeleton uses have given it a competitive advantage over the bigger rivals, he said.
The company’s products had the highest power and maximum peak current from five supercapacitor makers, including Maxwell and Ioxus Inc., in last year’s study by the U.S. Office of Naval Research.
Supercapacitors may find their niches if the cost becomes competitive, said Frith, the analyst at BloombergNEF.
“The heavy transportation applications probably is the best use case for supercapacitors,” Frith said. “There definitely is a lot of areas within the automotive market where they could find applications.”
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>>> Global Fiberglass Solutions Becomes the First US-Based Company to Commercially Recycle Wind Turbine Blades into Viable Products
PR Newswire
Jan. 29, 2019
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/global-fiberglass-solutions-becomes-the-first-us-based-company-to-commercially-recycle-wind-turbine-blades-into-viable-products-1027906087
SWEETWATER, Texas, Jan. 29, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- On January 8, 2019, the Global Fiberglass Solutions recycling and green manufacturing plant in Sweetwater, Texas began commercial production of its flagship product offering, a manufacturing-grade pellet. From the look of the thousands of tiny pellets streaming from manufacturing machinery at a scale fit for Texas' Big Country, one wouldn't initially guess they once made up a massive wind turbine blade. This is how Global Fiberglass Solutions is advancing recycling science – again.
The pellets for sale--under the brand name EcoPoly Pellets—are a thermoplastic fiberglass pellet usable in injection mold and extrusion manufacturing processes. Made from a customized blend of wind turbine blade material, EcoPoly Pellets are made to order for customers based on the requirements of the customer's own manufacturing process. GFS has initiated distribution options for pellet purchasing and the company is eager to speak with procurement and technical professionals from manufacturing companies interested in a truly sustainable recycled material. This innovation is a major advance in composite materials science to benefit commercial enterprise.
Global Fiberglass Solutions' recycled manufacturing pellet represents the company's innovation in repurposing waste material (decommissioned wind turbine blades) into green manufactured products that are commercially viable. Business and consumer interest in this type of material and product is at an all-time high and will continue to grow as the global economy continues to face modern environmental challenges. Deferring waste from landfill and then using it for new, environmentally sustainable products represents a huge win-win for businesses enacting sustainable measures worldwide.
What can be manufactured with EcoPoly Pellets? If the composite item can be made with pellets, GFS can customize EcoPoly Pellets to make it as well. Options previously tested by GFS include decking boards, warehouse pallets, parking bollards and much more.
The further upside of EcoPoly Pellets is that they are also certified to be recycled from wind turbine blades through GFS' BladeTracker material tracking software. In addition, GFS can recycle products manufactured with its material after it has reached its end use. For manufacturers looking for ways to be sustainable and go landfill-free, Global Fiberglass Solutions is their answer.
Catering to many different industries, GFS is engaged in distribution and subcontracting agreements as the pellet production is under way. In particular, the construction and automotive industries have been major players in product interest and agreements with GFS. With many large, multinational companies seeking out eco-friendly options for their operations, Global Fiberglass Solutions is ready to answer that call.
What is next for GFS? Pellets are only the beginning – the plant in Texas will be adding a high-volume panel press this year to begin producing recycled fiberglass construction panels – EcoPoly Panels. GFS executives have verified that the panel demand is even greater than the demand for pellets. The application possibilities, indicated by demand, include walkways for wind energy installations, walls and substrate flooring in construction, and floor panels for trailers in the automotive sector. In 2019, Global Fiberglass Solutions is bringing these and other cradle-to-cradle solutions to the material science of recycling, making extraordinary changes for the better.
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Skylo - >>> Secretive Startup Promises Satellite Internet for the Masses
Skylo’s $100 “hub” antennas can divvy up satellite signals among a bunch of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections.
Bloomberg
January 21, 2020
https://investorshub.advfn.com/secure/post_new.aspx?board_id=25502
For years, parades of companies have been trying to create an all-encompassing global wireless network that would have the power to connect every imaginable object to the internet, reaching places impervious to cell towers and fiber-optic cables. Silicon Valley startup Skylo Technologies Inc. says it’s come the closest so far.
The San Mateo company’s small but powerful antenna, which it unveiled on Jan. 21 after three years of development in secrecy, can connect to pricey satellite-based internet services and relay their bandwidth to hundreds of other devices. Similar technology is already on the market, but Skylo’s founders say theirs does the job way better for way less. “If this type of connection was available for a few dollars per month, it would open up entirely new markets for people who are completely unconnected and underserved,” says Chief Executive Officer Parthsarathi Trivedi.
Satellite services have long served people living on islands, vacationing on cruise ships, or hiking in the mountains. Typically, the equipment to run these systems costs thousands of dollars and requires bulky antennas that must be manually angled in certain directions. The Skylo antenna, essentially a flat circuit board about the size of a dinner plate, uses software to lock onto satellites so it can transmit data to nearby devices via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Customers will need to buy the antenna, which costs less than $100, then pay for Skylo’s service, which starts at $1 for a limited amount of data. The antenna is meant to be easy enough for customers to install themselves by, say, bolting it onto the roof of a boat or truck.
This is a logistics play, not the kind of effort to get everyone using Facebook that’s become so fraught over the past few years. Skylo says it’s not trying to deliver high-speed internet to homes or buildings. It’s more interested in allowing boats at sea or truckers on rural routes to send and receive short bursts of data for cheap. (No Netflix in the Sahara, unfortunately.) Its investors, including Innovation Endeavors, SoftBank, and Boeing’s venture capital arm, HorizonX, have bet $116 million so far that Skylo’s technology will be cheap enough to attract millions of customers who have sparse wireless access otherwise and little in the way of disposable income.
The company has spent months conducting tests of its hardware and service in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. In India, trucking companies are using hubs to track their fleets and make pickup routes more efficient. And fishermen have used it to receive weather updates and help with auctions for their catch. “There are 300,000 motorized fishing boats, and they are away for at least seven days at a time,” says Mahantesh Patil, Skylo’s vice president of sales in South Asia. “They want to know which fish are in demand at the markets and where to move if a typhoon is coming.” Other customers might include small farmers, who could coordinate tractor rentals during busy harvest seasons and even track the temperatures of animal vaccines or bull semen in transit to confirm that the precious cargo stays within the range needed to keep it viable.
Rajesh Agrawal, a board member of Indian Railways, has overseen the testing of Skylo on passenger cars and says freight cars are soon to follow. “India is a vast country with dead zones all over where we might lose connections for up to an hour,” he says. Skylo has enabled passenger cars to steadily report their speed, direction, and any maintenance concerns like, say, a slipping wheel. Agrawal says the plan is to order thousands of hubs in the coming years.
Skylo will have to contend with plenty of competition. The companies promising to deliver their own low-cost data networks this year include a host of satellite startups that won’t have to worry about the obstacles faced by middlemen. CEO Trivedi contends that Skylo, which will be more widely available this summer, will remain cheaper by using existing satellites rather than building out infrastructure and that its rivals can’t match his antenna technology. “Our prices,” he says, “will be low and consistent around the world.”
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Ubiquitous Energy -
>>> CLEARVIEW POWER™ TECHNOLOGY
http://ubiquitous.energy/technology/
Invisible: up to 90% visible light transmitted; absorbs only ultraviolet and infrared
Efficient: over 10% achievable; optimization is independent of transparency
Low cost: low-cost, non-toxic materials; industry standard deposition equipment
Thin and light: film is less than 1/1000th of a millimeter thick
Ubiquitous: ClearView Power™ can generate electricity on any surface or device without aesthetic impact
Ubiquitous-Energy-Schematic
ClearView Power™: Ubiquitous Energy has redesigned the solar cell to selectively transmit light visible to the human eye while absorbing only the ultraviolet and infrared light and converting it into electricity. This makes ClearView Power™ technology the first truly transparent solar technology, allowing any surface to convert ambient light into useful electricity without impacting the way it looks. Two thirds of the light available for energy harvesting is in the ultraviolet and the infrared, leading to practical efficiencies over 10% while maintaining up to 90% visible transparency. ClearView Power™ leverages Ubiquitous Energy’s technology and patent portfolio, including exclusive rights to award-winning technology developed by the company co-founders at MIT and MSU.
Conventional Solar: Photovoltaics absorb ambient light and convert it into useful electricity, offering the promise of ubiquitous, clean, renewable energy. However, conventional solar cells are opaque, which limits their use to a few specific applications (e.g., roof mounted) due to aesthetic constraints. Previous attempts to make these solar cells transparent have focused on allowing only a portion of visible light to pass through by either thinning down the photoactive material or segmenting cells across the module area. Because this approach suffers from a tradeoff between transparency and efficiency, neither is achieved.
Commercial Production: To bring ClearView Power technology to market, Ubiquitous Energy established production capabilities in Silicon Valley with a complete set of fabrication, characterization, and environmental testing tools. This facility is designed to prepare ClearView Power™ for mass production. Non-toxic, readily available materials are deposited by industry-standard vacuum deposition techniques common in high-throughput film coating processes, and the low-temperature deposition process can utilize rigid or flexible substrates. Ubiquitous Energy is currently working with commercial partners including the largest glass manufacturers in the world.
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SimpliPhi Power-- >>> Building a Lithium-Ion Battery That Won’t Explode
Avoiding cobalt adds weight but reduces the risk of fire.
Bloomberg
November 15, 2019
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-15/simpliphi-s-lithium-ion-battery-is-less-likely-to-explode?srnd=premium
Last year, when Jesse Gerstin was leading the Clinton Foundation’s climate initiatives, one of his tasks was to bring reliable power to hospitals and other critical infrastructure in Puerto Rico. Hurricane Maria had devastated the island a year earlier, highlighting just how vulnerable its electrical grid was. It remains unreliable today.
Solar power made the most sense. The question was how to store energy to use at night. One of the engineers working with Gerstin suggested pairing the solar equipment with batteries made by SimpliPhi Power. The company, based in Oxnard, Calif., manufactures what it describes as clean, safe lithium-ion batteries, free of cobalt, the toxic element that can lead batteries to overheat and catch fire. SimpliPhi’s power systems instead use lithium iron phosphate (LFP), a compound that doesn’t have those risks. Blue Planet Energy and Sonnen, makers of energy storage systems, also produce batteries using the safer compound.
The Clinton Foundation and other groups have since installed SimpliPhi systems—batteries, management software, and other tools—in multiple hospitals and clinics across the island. The model is proving useful for California homeowners and businesses dealing with the blackouts prompted by wildfires, says Gerstin, who joined SimpliPhi in May as head of sustainable business development.
SimpliPhi is competing with Sonnen, Tesla Inc., and other battery makers to play a bigger role in the shift away from fossil fuels to clean energy. “How can we talk about clean energy if we’re using a chemistry that is fundamentally hazardous and toxic?” says Catherine Von Burg, SimpliPhi’s co-founder, president, and chief executive officer.
Lithium-ion batteries are a decades-old technology that revolutionized consumer electronics in the 1990s and electric power vehicles more recently. (Three scientists who developed the batteries—John Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino— won this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry.) The technology is considered crucial to the widespread adoption of solar and wind energy because the electricity generated needs to be stored cheaply and safely when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
Energy storage installations around the world will “multiply exponentially” over the next two decades, requiring $662 billion in investment, according to a July forecast from BloombergNEF, Bloomberg LP’s primary research service on energy transition. The market today relies more on cobalt chemistries, but the safer LFP compound used is increasing its market share in commercial and residential facilities and utilities, says Logan Goldie-Scot, head of energy storage analysis at BNEF.
Unlike other battery startups that have burned through hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital, SimpliPhi hasn’t taken any. The company, which gets most of its revenue from equipment sales, has been profitable since 2013, doubling or tripling revenue annually, says Von Burg. The company expects revenue to exceed $20 million for 2019. Tens of thousands of its systems, which range from bright yellow portable emergency power kits to units big enough to power entire hospitals, have been deployed in more than 40 countries. All its employees, including manufacturing line workers, are part-owners.
Electrical engineer Josh Crosby, president of power-system consulting firm CatalystE in Huntsville, Ala., has been using SimpliPhi’s batteries in projects for the U.S. military since 2014. Their safety track record, efficiency, and price—two to three times less than what military battery makers charge—led him to SimpliPhi, he says. Its batteries have been tested at the U.S. Army Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and the Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. “Cobalt is more energy-dense and lighter, but it’s not going to last as long, and you have an inherent risk of fire,” Crosby says.
In October 2018, SimpliPhi Power relocated from an 8,000-square-foot factory in Ojai, Calif., to a 25,000-square-foot factory in Oxnard, where all of its batteries are made on the same production line. Von Burg plans to break ground on a second factory next year, potentially in Africa or in India, she says. Improving energy access with nontoxic batteries “isn’t a moralistic argument about what’s right, what’s wrong,” she says. “Shifting to renewables is critical.”
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>>> Why FPOs Are Taking the Wind Out of Tech IPOs
Bloomberg
November 1, 2019
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-01/why-fpos-are-taking-the-wind-out-of-tech-ipos-quicktake?srnd=premium
It used to be that technology company initial public offerings (IPOs), were as exciting and potentially enriching an event as the markets had to offer, as investors fought to get in on the ground floor of a hot startup. Now there’s a different ground floor: the final private offering, or what some in technology circles are calling an FPO. These late-stage venture capital funding rounds are attracting increased interest from a wide range of other big investors. The demand comes as startups stay private longer, making an FPO a way to buy a stake in a more mature company before those companies enter public markets.
1. What happens during an FPO?
Like IPOs, FPOs also raise money by issuing new stock, but they do so on the private market. In addition to gaining the money companies need to fuel their growth, these private deals can also let insiders and other early investors sell some of their existing shares. (Confusingly, FPO is also an acronym for follow-on public offerings, a new issue of stock from a company that’s already held an IPO.)
2. How is this different from normal fundraising?
There’s no strict definition of an FPO versus a typical venture-capital financing round, and the finality of the fundraising is a promise or expectation, not a guarantee. But a key feature is they often go beyond the VC circle to bring in a broader group of investors. In the past, the job of an IPO was to make this transition from private to public market shareholders. Now FPOs start the process earlier, though with some of the same beat-the-rush allure.
3. What’s in it for investors?
Getting in on an FPO can make it easier for them to amass a large stake in a company than if they wait for the IPO. During the IPO process, a company sells a limited pool of stock, with investment banks deciding how it’s apportioned. Some FPO rounds can become so big that the investors that normally would have tried to get in on an IPO allocation stay on the sidelines because they already own stakes -- a factor that’s been cited in the lackluster responses when Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. launched their IPOs. Peloton Interactive Inc. and SmileDirectClub Inc. also won big backers in private transactions, only to see their shares drop after public offerings. Overall, IPOs have lost a lot of their luster as instant cash machines: In the first 10 months of this year, only 13% of new offerings in the U.S. saw their share price rise by 50% or more in the first 30 days. In 1999, during the dot-com boom, almost half of U.S. IPOs met or exceeded that performance.
Fewer IPOs and Much Less Pop
Compared to the dot.com boom, only a handful of U.S. offerings this year saw their share price soar in the first month; 2019 data through Oct. 31
4. Who buys in?
Hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds and family offices are all among FPO investors. Engineers and executives in the tech industry have also been pooling their money into special purpose vehicles that buy stock from startup insiders. These opportunities even attract mutual fund companies that traditionally have focused on public markets, like Fidelity Investments Co. and T. Rowe Price Group Inc. So far this year, 27% of VC rounds that raised more than $100 million had at least one such “crossover” investor that normally deals in public markets. That’s up from 13% in 2017, according to Silicon Valley Bank.
5. Are there any downsides?
Private investments don’t always live up to their original promise. When an IPO planned by WeWork collapsed, the steep fall in the company’s fortunes showed the perils of private markets, where valuations can soar only to fall into a downward spiral when faced with the scrutiny of public markets. Airbnb Inc. has also raised billions of dollars, including from crossover investors, as a private company. But its private valuation of about $31 billion has barely budged since 2016, even as the company worked on plans to publicly trade its shares next year.
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ConsenSys - >>> Blockchain Solutions
ConsenSys is a global blockchain company. We develop enterprise applications, invest in startups, build developer tools, and offer blockchain education <<<
https://consensys.net/
>>> WeWork Fiasco, Peloton Flop Endanger Unicorns Hoping For Big IPOs
Bloomberg
By Crystal Tse and Michael Hytha
September 27, 2019
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-27/ipo-collapse-threatens-2020-class-of-unicorn-hopefuls?srnd=premium
Postmates, McAfee IPO plans unclear, Madewell moving ahead
Airbnb could meet gloomy, uncertain environment in 2020
WeWork, Peloton, Endeavor, Poshmark and more just got the message: It’s not a great time to go public.
Disappointing initial public offerings and unsettled economic conditions could shut down many IPOs for the rest of the year -- and maybe well into 2020, when the next batch of marquee IPO candidates like Airbnb could meet an even gloomier market and geopolitical environment.
The Hollywood agency Endeavor Group Holdings Inc. shelved its IPO on Thursday, saying unfavorable market conditions have dented investor sentiment. Poshmark Inc., an online resale marketplace for second-hand clothing, is expected to postpone its IPO into next year. Also in flux are a range of stock offerings from e-commerce companies and cybersecurity firms Palantir Technologies Inc., Postmates Inc., and McAfee Inc.
The dim outlook isn’t a total surprise given the high-profile flops this year. Fitness startup Peloton Interactive Inc. fell 11% below its IPO price on its first day of trading Thursday and extended declines by 2% on Friday. WeWork, the office-sharing company, was forced to put off its offering to next year in the face of tepid demand.
Ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft have also traded well below their offering prices, prompting “a lot more market scrutiny” of IPOs, said Jeffrey Langbaum, a senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.
The trend shows a disconnect between companies’ lofty private valuations and public expectations that are skeptical of even well-known brands.
“Private valuations have been going up, but that hasn’t necessarily translated into the public IPO market,” said EquityZen research analyst Adam Augusiak-Boro.
Sell Instead
Sharing-economy startups, especially late-stage companies, are going to have a tough time going public, said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh. The appeal of selling rather than going public will increase for companies such as Postmates, he said.
Postmates said it had submitted a confidential filing in February, but so far there is no sign the company is starting an IPO roadshow anytime soon. Its plans could slip in to 2020, people familiar with the matter said. Postmates declined to comment.
Palantir, the security company, has decided to keep on its path of raising billions in the private markets instead of a near-term IPO, Bloomberg has reported.
McAfee had been looking to be valued as high as $8 billion in an IPO later this fall, Bloomberg has reported. It’s unclear where its plans stand. McAfee declined to comment.
J. Crew Plans
Despite the uncertainty, some IPOs on deck for the year are moving forward, but it might be because they have no choice. Madewell, the denim unit of J. Crew, is still planning to go public this year, according to a person familiar with the matter. J. Crew is distressed and the company is under pressure to deliver returns to its credit holders. A representative for Madewell declined to comment.
Before the high-profile IPO slog this month, 2019 had been a solid one for debut offerings. With almost $17.4 billion raised, May was the biggest month for IPOs on U.S. exchanges since September 2014 when Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. raised $25 billion in its IPO. More than half of the May total was Uber’s $8.1 billion offering.
Overall, 187 IPOs on U.S. exchanges have raised $59 billion this year, including so-called greenshoe shares issued by underwriters after the initial listing.
Bright Spots
Software and cloud computing companies have generally performed well. Crowdstrike Holdings Inc. exceeded its IPO target with a $612 million offering in June and its shares are now up more than 50% from its offer price.
Beyond Meat Inc., which makes burgers made of chickpeas other plant-based proteins, is the best performer of the IPO class of 2019, with its shares trading more than 500% above their offer price.
Smaller, less high-profile companies also seem able to push ahead with IPOs. Opportun Financial Corp., a financial technology company, finished trading 8% above its IPO price after raising roughly $90 million.
Still, other software companies have flopped. Slack Technologies Inc., a workplace-messaging platform provider, bypassed the IPO process with an unusual direct listing of its shares. Slack’s shares are now down about 15% since the debut.
“Companies aren’t necessarily rushing to go public,” said Alan Felder, head of private capital markets for Americas at UBS Group AG. “The private market is very healthy.”
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>>> Acurx Announces First-In-Man Clinical Trial Data of ACX-362E for CDI
February 27, 2019
https://www.acurxpharma.com/news-media/press-releases/detail/8/acurx-announces-first-in-man-clinical-trial-data-of
- QIDP and FDA-Fast-Track-Designated first of a new class of antibiotics
- Phase 1 Clinical Trial provides first evidence of human safety and favorable PK profile
- Fecal concentrations of ACX-362E exceeded concentrations known to inhibit C. difficile by factors of several hundred-fold.
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y., Feb. 27, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Acurx Pharmaceuticals, LLC ("Acurx" or the "Company"), a privately-held, clinical stage, biopharmaceutical company developing new antibiotics for difficult-to-treat bacterial infections, announced today that its lead product candidate, ACX-362E, has successfully completed the 32-subject, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, single-ascending dose portion of this first-in-man Phase 1 clinical trial. ACX-362E is a novel, oral antibacterial agent for the treatment of Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI), an acute, serious, potentially life-threatening, intestinal infection. ACX-362E is Acurx's lead compound in a pipeline of molecules that target a previously unexploited mechanism of action, namely, inhibition of the bacterial enzyme DNA polymerase IIIC (pol IIIC). Pol IIIC is required for DNA replication of many Gram-positive pathogens, including not only Clostridioides but also Enterococcus, Staphylococcus, and Streptococcus. Although the trial data remain blinded, ongoing monitoring of the data show dose levels up to 600mg have been generally well tolerated. Blood levels of ACX-362E show low systemic exposure, as predicted by prior animal studies and desirable in treating CDI. Additionally, fecal concentrations of ACX-362E at higher dose levels have exceeded the concentrations known to inhibit C. difficile by several hundred-fold.
"We are very encouraged by these initial data which corroborate our nonclinical findings, showing that at well-tolerated doses ACX-362E reaches concentrations in the colon that are projected to be therapeutically relevant for patients with CDI" said Robert J. DeLuccia, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Acurx. "This gives us confidence that the ongoing multiple-dose segment of the trial will provide data to guide selection of our Phase 2 dose and improve the probability of success and timeline efficiency of our Phase 2 clinical trial planned to start later this year."
Dr. Kevin Garey, Professor, University of Houston College of Pharmacy and the Principal Investigator for microbiomic aspects of the Phase 1 clinical trial said: "The emerging fecal concentration data are comparable to those observed with precedent products that have advanced to demonstrate clinical success. I look forward to the multiple-dose safety data and to the results of the microbiomic analyses that our laboratory is performing which will form a template for a new paradigm in microbiome studies associated with drug discovery and development of CDI-directed antibiotics."
About the Phase 1 Clinical Trial
This Phase 1 trial, conducted in the U.S., is a double-blinded, placebo-controlled study to determine safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics and fecal concentrations of ACX-362E in healthy volunteers. It is being conducted in two parts; first, single ascending doses are administered to four cohorts of 8 subjects each, and second, multiple ascending doses are given that simulate the anticipated clinical treatment regimen. Safety information is analyzed through assessment of adverse events and other standard safety measures, while concentrations of ACX-362E are determined in both the blood and the feces, the latter being the critical site of drug delivery for treating CDI. In addition, Acurx has partnered with the laboratory of Dr. Kevin Garey at the University of Houston to perform state-of-the-art microbiomic testing of gastrointestinal flora in trial subjects.
About ACX-362E, FDA QIDP and Fast Track Designation
FDA Fast Track Designation is a process designed to facilitate the development and expedite the regulatory pathway of new drugs to treat serious or life-threatening conditions and that fill a high unmet medical need. ACX-362E is a novel, first-in-class, orally-administered antibacterial. It is the first of a novel class of DNA polymerase IIIC inhibitors under development by Acurx to treat bacterial infections. Acurx acquired ACX-362E from GLSynthesis, Inc. in February 2018.
ACX-362E is a Qualified Infectious Disease Product (QIDP) for the treatment of patients with Clostridium difficile infection (CDI). Under QIDP designation, ACX-362E will now be eligible to benefit from certain incentives for the development of new antibiotics provided under the Generating Antibiotic Incentives Now Act (the GAIN Act). These incentives include Priority Review and eligibility for Fast Track status. Further, if ultimately approved by the FDA, ACX-362E is eligible for an additional five-year extension of Hatch-Waxman marketing exclusivity. ACX-362E is being developed as a targeted, narrow spectrum oral antibiotic for the treatment of patients with CDI. Acurx anticipates completing the Phase 1 clinical trial in the second quarter of 2019 and is planning to advance ACX-362E into a Phase 2 clinical trial in the fourth quarter of 2019. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention) has designated Clostridium difficile bacteria as an urgent threat highlighting the need for new antibiotics to treat CDI.
About Clostridium Difficile Infection (CDI)
The CDC has reported that there are nearly 500,000 patients per year treated for CDI in the U.S. alone, with a recurrence rate approximated at 20% to 30%, with limited antibiotics available to treat patients with CDI. CDI is also prevalent in Europe, Japan and Canada, which are countries where the Company has patent protection and anticipates further clinical development and commercialization.
About DNA polymerase IIIC (pol IIIC)
Building on the mechanism of action of ACX-362E, Acurx's lead product candidate, which acts as a DNA polymerase IIIC inhibitor and targets the oral treatment of CDI (C. difficile Infection), Acurx has identified additional potential therapeutic candidates to add to its pipeline. Nonclinical research has established the mechanism of action of ACX-362E as the selective inhibition of the enzyme DNA polymerase IIIC (pol IIIC), which is required for bacterial replication and pathogenesis. This enzyme is found only in certain Gram-positive bacteria, including C. difficile as well as the pathogens Enterococcus (including vancomycin-resistant strains or VRE), Staphylococcus (including methicillin-resistant strains or MRSA), and Streptococcus (including antibiotic-resistant strains). Accordingly, chemically-related molecules with the same mechanism of action as ACX-362E have the potential to treat a variety of serious systemic Gram-positive infectious diseases.
About Acurx Pharmaceuticals, LLC
Acurx Pharmaceuticals is a privately held clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing new antibiotics for difficult to treat infections. Acurx's approach is to develop antibiotic candidates that could potentially block an entirely new molecular target, DNA polymerase IIIC (pol IIIC) and its R&D pipeline includes early stage antibiotic candidates that target other Gram-positive bacteria that are active parenterally, including Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococcus (VRE) and Penicillin-Resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae (PRSP).
For more information, please visit our website at www.acurxpharma.com.
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>>> Aquanomix and AMIAD Water Systems join forces!
January 22, 2018
https://aquanomix.com/aquanomix-amiad-water-systems-join-forces/
AMIAD USA Inc. AND AQUANOMIX JOIN FORCES TO TRANSFORM INDUSTRIAL WATER MANAGEMENT
Charlotte, N.C., (January 22, 2018) … Amiad USA Inc., a global leader in water treatment and filtration solutions, and Aquanomix LLC, a technology leader pioneering the Internet of Things (IOT) in water management, announce a strategic partnership that will transform cooling tower water management.
The two companies will combine their products in GenesisTM– a hardware and software system – provides the user with a real-time risk management platform that offers greater protection for critical cooling systems. The system will increase efficiency, save costs and reduces the risks of biological activity in cooling systems. The product will be available March 1, 2018.
“Symphony GenesisTM is the first system that marries water treatment hardware with optimization software in one easy to use package” said Michael Poth, Amiad USA President. “We anticipate great interest from anyone who treats water in cooling tower installations.”
The partnership will leverage Amiad’s engineering and development capabilities and the revolutionary SymphonyTM cloud-based, water-monitoring platform
Water management programs for cooling tower systems address four key elements: scale, corrosion, microbiology, and fouling. Historically, responsibility for these critical elements has been divided between mechanical and chemical areas of discipline. Chemistry takes care of scale, corrosion, and microbiology control. Mechanical filtration removes fouling components, such as dirt and other airborne particulates, which can act as nutrient sources for microbiological organisms. GenesisTM is the first product to monitor all four elements in a single system.
“By joining forces, we have enabled our customers with an intuitive risk management platform” said Rob O’Donnell, Aquanomix CEO. “We believe this product could become the industry benchmark.”
“We’ve blended data management and proven filtration technology” added Poth. “Genesis will provide critical data to property managers, building owners, and risk managers who can expect to lower their operating costs because they have reduced water and energy use.”
Each partner plays a key role in production and distribution. Amiad makes the complete skids – piping, filtration, pumps, and more – for the system. Aquanomix provides sensors and hardware for the monitoring system and the software. Customers can purchase Symphony GenesisTM through the Aquanomix distribution network. Support for software is through Aquanomix’s Davidson, NC headquarters, and on-site support of the system is provided by both companies.
About Amiad
Amiad USA Inc. is the North American branch of Amiad Water Systems, a leading producer of automatic, self-cleaning water treatment and filtration products and systems. Through its engineering skills and ability to innovate, Amiad provides cost-effective, green solutions for the industrial, municipal, irrigation, oil and gas, and ballast water markets. In these segments, its patented products are being integrated into the core of systems for filtration and water treatment, micro-irrigation, membrane protection, wastewater and potable water treatment, cooling systems, and sea water filtration.
Headquartered in Mooresville, N.C., Amiad USA Inc.provides these solutions through a comprehensive network of distributors to customers throughout North America.
About Aquanomix
Aquanomix is an environmental technology company that delivers water optimization and energy-saving platforms for water-based systems. Aquanomix has pioneered the emerging water reuse market in the U.S. marketplace. The company is best known for its Nexus Number, which delivers the building’s water quality and heat exchanger efficiency data into a single portal, straight to the building’s owners and operators.
Headquartered in Davidson, N.C., Aquanomix developed the SymphonyTM platform to explore, define, and predict intrinsic relationships among environmental, operating, and economic factors that drive cooling water generation through real-time data aggregation and analysis.
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$COTE trip2s going quick
http://www.coatesengine.com/csrv-system.html
Stripe - >>> Globalization Helped Make Stripe a $23 Billion Company. Here’s What Comes Next
The chief of the world’s most valuable payments startup confronts an increasingly fractured world economy.
Bloomberg
By Ellen Huet
February 6, 2019
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-06/globalization-helped-make-stripe-a-23-billion-company-here-s-what-comes-next
In 2010, when Patrick Collison founded Stripe Inc. with his younger brother John, he thought the world was headed toward ever-increasing globalization, economic stability and international commerce.
Now, based on the events of the last couple years, no one holds “so Panglossian a view,” said the 30-year-old chief executive officer. “There are more headwinds to global economic integration than there were any time in the past 20 years,” Collison said. “That’s going to make global expansion more difficult for businesses in general.”
Stripe builds software and payment infrastructure that helps businesses accept money online and across borders. And even as nationalism is on the rise, Stripe will continue its de-facto march for globalization, as if its business depended on it, which in some respects, it does. Collison said the company will add a half-dozen countries in the next couple months to the 23 where service is widely available today.
Part of the wager investors have made on Stripe is that it can keep getting a piece of more transactions and in more places. However, the business is vulnerable to an economic downturn that would constrain consumer spending and the spread of a strain of politics that could place higher barriers on companies to operate internationally. So, it’s natural that Collison would see impediments to global trade as “obviously a bad thing.”
Yet, Stripe’s backers remain optimistic. After Tiger Global Management led a $245 million investment in September, the hedge fund put in another $100 million last week. Stripe said the deal pushes the company’s valuation to $22.5 billion. One thing that could drive further momentum for the business, according to Collison, is that red tape makes Stripe more valuable to companies. As doing business internationally becomes more complicated, more companies will want to pay for a service like Stripe to handle it for them, he said.
Collison will test this theory with a forthcoming expansion in the euro zone. The new markets—Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland—are smaller economies that may have more trouble navigating the European Union’s volatile business climate as it grapples with the consequences of Brexit, the internet privacy rule known as the General Data Protection Regulation and a dimming economic outlook across the region. Collison said the countries have strong developer talent and vibrant tech scenes. Stripe should assess these markets on their potential and not their current size, he added.
Stripe will also offer services in Malaysia soon, and Collison said the company is eyeing India. Stripe has been testing the product with customers in India for about a year, and the world’s second-most-populous country is expected to generate more e-commerce growth in the future. However, local regulations pose obstacles to a nationwide rollout.
This year, in an attempt to keep a more global perspective, Stripe plans to make the majority of its hires in locales outside of its headquarters in San Francisco. It currently has engineering hubs in Dublin, Seattle and Singapore. “There’s so much that’s market- and country-specific about money,” he said. “We don’t want to be this San Francisco company that swaggers in, thinks it knows everything and has all the answers.”
“There’s so much that’s market- and country-specific about money”
Collison, an Ireland native who dropped out of MIT to start Stripe, said many Americans have been focused on the wrong economic trends. “From my standpoint, the biggest thing in internet news, like if you were writing the annual report of the internet last year,”—he made typing motions in the air—“is barriers between countries getting higher and much more active, country-specific regulation.”
Even as Collison was eager to discuss some of the global economy’s greatest questions, he was reticent to discuss one of his own. He declined to comment on plans for an initial public offering.
Collison said Stripe benefits when online commerce grows. The idea harkens back to one Google has promoted over the years, that increased internet usage helps its ad business. Perhaps not coincidentally, Stripe has been hiring more people from the search giant. Diane Greene, the former CEO of Google Cloud, recently joined as the fourth outside director on Stripe’s board. The company also hired its chief technology officer and head of security from Google.
In addition to processing payments, Stripe runs some seemingly tangential projects. It publishes a quarterly magazine about software engineering called Increment; it acquired a forum for entrepreneurs called Indie Hackers; and it recently started printing books through Stripe Press about broad ideas in economics, technology and management.
The ventures have prompted some observers to scratch their heads. It’s a curious way for a young company to spend investor money. But if books, magazine articles and an online community can help someone make the jump to starting an online business, Collison reasons, then they might choose to accept payments through Stripe.
“These are not just feel-good projects,” Collison said. “There’s a real, underlying, strategic reason. Ultimately, what will determine Stripe’s success in 10, 20, 30 years is the overall vibrancy and success of the internet economy. If we really take that seriously—and we try to—then these are important.”
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>>> With the Economy Uncertain, Tech ‘Unicorns’ Rush Toward I.P.O.
Uber and Lyft have accelerated their timelines for an initial public offering, said people with knowledge of the companies’ plans.
By Erin Griffith and Mike Isaac
Dec. 6, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/technology/lyft-uber-ipo.html?module=inline
SAN FRANCISCO — For years, Uber and Lyft put off going public. Now, they are speeding up.
Faced with a volatile stock market and the prospect of an economic downturn next year, the ride-hailing services have moved more urgently toward an initial public offering, said four people with knowledge of the companies’ plans, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Lyft originally aimed to list its shares toward the middle of 2019, but it began moving more quickly after the recent stock market sell-off and because of a desire to go public before Uber, said two of the people. On Thursday, the company, which was most recently valued at $15 billion, announced it had filed confidentially for an I.P.O.
Uber has also hastened its I.P.O. clock. The company had once said it was looking to the fall of 2019 to go public, but has pushed that timing up because of concerns that a recession might be coming, said two people familiar with the plans. Uber could now go public as soon as next April, they said. Investment banks have told the company it could be worth as much as $120 billion in an I.P.O.
The moves by Lyft and Uber indicate how tricky it can be to decide when to go public at a time when stock markets have been turbulent and the broader economic picture is muddied. The calculus for when a company publicly lists its shares is often a moving target, but Uber’s and Lyft’s actions will carry particular weight with a swath of other highly valued Silicon Valley start-ups that are also preparing to approach the public markets.
Airbnb, the online room rental company, plans to be ready to go public by mid-2019 though it has not set a formal timeline, said a person with knowledge of the matter. Slack, the online collaboration company, has said it is readying for a public offering but has no specific timeline.
“Companies that were talking about 2020 have been told that the window may not be open as long as previously thought,” said Barrett Daniels, a partner at Deloitte who advises on I.P.O.s. He said that he was telling companies that “if an I.P.O. is in your plan, I would probably be getting ready now.”
Any stock market debuts of these companies will be the final chapter of the era of “unicorns,” the privately held start-ups valued at more than $1 billion. Many of these companies, which were born after the 2008 recession, rode a wave of smartphone adoption, turning businesses like taxis or grocery delivery into on-demand services. They also benefited from abundant capital from private investors, which was driven by low interest rates.
For years, many unicorns were in no rush to go public because they could grow easily with money from private investors and away from the scrutiny of Wall Street. In 2016, Travis Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder and then chief executive, spoke for many tech start-ups when he said at a conference that his company would go public “as late as humanly possible.” Employees would be distracted by stock price movements, he said.
Those attitudes have shifted as investors and tech employees have increased pressure on the companies to go public so that they can cash in their shares.
“The forcing factor is, how do you deal with issues of employee retention?” said Rick Heitzmann, a managing director at FirstMark Capital, which is an investor in unicorns such as Pinterest and Airbnb.
But the seesawing stock market, a trade war with China and other countries and uncertainty over the direction of the economy are all now weighing on I.P.O. decision-making. Few executives want to take their companies public when investors’ appetite for shares may be ebbing.
“Companies that were waiting for everything to be perfect before going public might have been better off going when things were good enough,” Mr. Heitzmann said.
Sandy Miller, a venture capitalist at IVP, said several companies were meeting with potential investors far ahead of filing for an I.P.O., in what are known as pre-roadshow events. “That’s the only way to really know what kind of receptivity you’re going to have” from the public markets, he said.
Mr. Miller said that he expected a robust year for I.P.O.s next year, but that companies may not want to wait until too late in the year to file. “There are certainly some storm clouds on the horizon,” he said.
Some unicorns are sidestepping the unpredictability altogether. WeWork, an office rental company valued at $45 billion, has been widely named as an I.P.O. candidate. But in November, the company agreed to sell an additional $3 billion of shares to its main investor, SoftBank’s Vision fund. That deal has allowed WeWork to push plans for a public listing further into the future, said a person familiar with the company.
For Uber and Lyft, the biggest question they face from public market investors is whether their businesses can be profitable. Expanding a ride-hailing service requires outlays to recruit drivers in multiple cities, which can quickly get expensive. Uber said last month that it lost $1.07 billion in the third quarter, as it spent to invest in new areas such as bicycles, scooters and freight shipments.
Inside Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive, has raced to prepare the company to go public. Over the past year, the company has overhauled many of its internal processes, from items as small as creating more formal systems for expense reports to global safeguards that ensure legal compliance in every area where Uber operates.
Going public sooner could give Uber a number of advantages. It would mean raising fresh outside capital, providing the company ammunition to pursue acquisitions and other opportunities. And it would enable Mr. Khosrowshahi to potentially reshape Uber’s board because current members can be asked to leave when there is a liquidity event like an I.P.O., according to the company charter. Uber’s board has grappled with a history of infighting.
Lyft is likely to still go public ahead of Uber because it has already filed for an offering. In a statement on Thursday about its confidential I.P.O. filing, Lyft said it had not yet determined how many shares would be sold or their price range.
Any offering would be “subject to market and other conditions,” Lyft said.
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>>> Slack Files for Public Offering, Joining Silicon Valley’s Stock Market Rush
NY Times
2-5-19
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/technology/slack-ipo.html
Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s chief executive, has long indicated that he planned to take the company public.
SAN FRANCISCO — Slack, a workplace messaging company, said Monday that it had confidentially filed paperwork for an initial public offering, joining the growing number of technology start-ups heading to the stock market.
Slack, which is based in San Francisco, gave no details about the offering’s timing and said it was awaiting a standard review of its paperwork by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The move was expected given that Slack’s chief executive, Stewart Butterfield, had long indicated that he planned to take the company public. Slack recently hired Goldman Sachs to lead the offering.
Slack’s confidential filing comes amid a rush by privately held companies to go public this year. Many of these start-ups, which have been highly valued by private investors, are part of a generation of technology companies known as unicorns. Public share sales by the companies are expected to create a bonanza of riches in Silicon Valley for entrepreneurs and venture capital investors.
In December, the ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft filed confidential paperwork for their own public offerings. Their efforts stalled temporarily last month when a government shutdown hampered the S.E.C.’s ability to review the companies’ registration documents. Other tech companies expected to go public this year include the online scrapbooking firm Pinterest.
Slack declined to comment beyond its statement about the confidential filing.
There is likely to be a strong demand for Slack stock. The company was valued at $7.1 billion by private investors last year, but in recent weeks investment firms have offered to buy its shares at a price that values Slack at $13 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the details who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Slack also plans an unusual form of public offering called a direct listing, the person added. Unlike most I.P.O.s, in which firms sell stock to public market investors in advance, direct listings let a company begin trading its shares on an exchange without raising new funds. Spotify, a provider of streaming music, went public in 2018 in a direct listing, paving the way for other high-profile start-ups to follow.
With a direct listing, shareholders can also sell their stock immediately after the public offering, instead of waiting for what is known as a lockup period to expire.
Slack has little need for cash. It raised $427 million in new financing in August, a year after raising $250 million. The company has collected a total of more than $1 billion from investors that include the SoftBank Vision Fund, General Atlantic, Dragoneer Investment Group and T. Rowe Price Associates.
Mr. Butterfield began Slack out of a gaming start-up, Tiny Speck. While the company’s game products failed to take off, its internal communication tool showed promise. In 2014, the company began selling that communication tool, called Slack.
Start-ups quickly adopted Slack, and larger companies followed suit. The company offers free and paid versions of Slack and counts more than 85,000 paying customers, including 65 Fortune 100 companies. Last month, Slack said 10 million people now used its product every day. The company generated more than $350 million in revenue last year, said the person with knowledge of the details.
Some companies that have filed to go public have never reached that finish line. Over the last year, a number of high-profile business software companies that took steps to go public were snapped up by a tech giant at the last minute. In November, for example, Qualtrics, an analytics start-up, sold to SAP for $8 billion just days before it was set to ring the opening bell at Nasdaq.
Google, Microsoft and Amazon have previously expressed interest in acquiring Slack, but the company has demurred. Now some of them have increasingly begun to compete with the start-up. When Microsoft introduced its own workplace messaging company, Microsoft Teams, in 2016, Slack took out a newspaper ad directed at its new competitor.
“We’re genuinely excited to have some competition,” it read.
In January, Microsoft announced that 420,000 organizations used its Teams product, including 89 of the Fortune 100.
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>>> Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd develops technologies for new drug discovery. In addition, the company also develops therapeutic proteins. Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd was founded in 2000 and is based in Nes Ziona, Israel.
9 Hamazmera St.
Nes Ziona, 4010
Israel
Founded in 2000
www.aebi-bio.com
Key Executives For Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd
Dr. Ilan Morad Ph.D.
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>>> Neiman Marcus: Sales Growth Continues, but at a Slow Pace
The luxury department store has achieved four consecutive quarters of comp sales growth, but it is still far from being healthy.
Adam Levine-Weinberg
Motley Fool
Sep 24, 2018
https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/09/24/neiman-marcus-sales-growth-continues-but-at-a-slow.aspx
Privately held Neiman Marcus reported its fourth-quarter results for fiscal 2018 last week. The recently ended fiscal year marked a return to sales growth for the luxury retailer.
But although Neiman Marcus delivered its fourth consecutive quarterly comp sales gain, its growth rate is slowing again. Meanwhile, profitability remained weak in fiscal 2018 -- and the company needs to continue investing heavily to keep up with better-funded rivals, such as Nordstrom (NYSE:JWN) and Hudson's Bay's (NASDAQOTH:HBAYF) Saks Fifth Avenue chain. That will make it hard for Neiman Marcus' private equity owners to exit their ill-advised investment.
Neiman Marcus has been under pressure
A pair of private equity firms bought Neiman Marcus for the lofty sum of $5.1 billion in 2005. They managed to flip the company to Ares Capital Management, another private equity firm, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board for $6 billion in 2013. That situation left Neiman Marcus with a massive debt load, which totaled around $4.7 billion as of mid-2015. (For comparison, annual revenue has been less than $5 billion in recent years.)
Things went from bad to worse over the next two years. In addition to the industry pressures affecting all department stores, Neiman Marcus was hit by a slowdown in the broader luxury market, as the strong dollar cut down on international tourist traffic to the U.S. and reduced those tourists' spending power. The botched rollout of a new inventory management system added to the company's woes.
As a result, comp sales fell 4.1% in fiscal 2016, while gross margin plunged. That drop caused adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) to plummet to $585 million from $711 million a year earlier.
The misery continued in fiscal 2017, as comp sales declined 5.2% and adjusted EBITDA fell all the way to $434 million. Total debt was still near $4.7 billion at year's end, giving Neiman Marcus a dreadful leverage ratio of nearly 11 times EBITDA. Furthermore, the downturn in profitability forced Neiman Marcus to cancel its plan to raise capital through an IPO.
A comeback -- but it's slowing
The health of the luxury market has improved over the past year, allowing Neiman Marcus to get comp sales growing again. During the first three quarters of fiscal 2018, comp sales surged 5.7% year over year. The strong sales gain drove margin expansion, boosting adjusted EBITDA to $421 million, compared with $386 million in the first three quarters of fiscal 2017.
Comp sales growth slowed to 2.3% last quarter. On the bright side, adjusted EBITDA continued to recover. For the full fiscal year, adjusted EBITDA reached $477 million. Of course, that is still far below Neiman Marcus' level of earnings from fiscal 2015 (or even fiscal 2016).
Furthermore, the growth slowdown came despite a strong consumer environment. Nordstrom posted a 4.1% comp sales gain in its full-line business last quarter. Meanwhile, Saks Fifth Avenue remained the main growth driver for Hudson's Bay. Saks, Neiman Marcus' most direct competitor in the luxury market, posted a stellar 6.7% comp sales increase last quarter.
This situation suggests that Neiman Marcus' apparent sales momentum earlier in fiscal 2018 may have owed more to easy year-over-year comparisons than to a genuine turnaround.
The competitive environment won't get any easier
The vast majority of Neiman Marcus' adjusted EBITDA goes toward paying its annual interest expense, which currently exceeds $300 million. All the rest, and then some, is needed for investments in the business. Neiman Marcus plans to spend between $170 million and $190 million on capex in fiscal 2019.
That still may not be enough to keep up with Nordstrom, which has been spending an average of around $700 million annually on capex. Much of that spending has gone toward technology, supply chain, and fulfillment capabilities. Meanwhile, Saks Fifth Avenue benefits from being under the Hudson's Bay umbrella, which encompasses several other department store chains.
In addition, Nordstrom will open its main Manhattan flagship store next fall. The site is just a few blocks away from Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury department store owned by Neiman Marcus, which accounts for a meaningful proportion of the company's revenue. It's possible that the new Nordstrom store will help Bergdorf Goodman by bringing more retail traffic to the area, but Nordstrom will also be a fierce competitor going forward.
Finally, Neiman Marcus' mall-based stores could continue to face pressure from declining mall traffic. There have finally been some signs of improvement at Neiman Marcus in the past year, but the outlook is still dim because of the company's massive debt load.
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BSTN to purchase private company Nuova Abibes. Deal should close this month.
Boston Carriers Inc. Announces an Exclusive Agreement for purchasing Nuova Abibes SRL (“Nuova”)
BY GLOBENEWSWIRE — 05/02/2018
ATHENS, Greece, May 02, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Boston Carriers Inc. (BSTN) ("Boston" or the "Company") announces that in April 24 2018, the company entered into an exclusivity agreement with Nuova. The agreement provides six months for the acquisition of Nuova and all its assets and liabilities including but not limited to the storage facility in Italy as well as all its business, licenses and trademarks.
Some of the largest privately held companies -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privately_held_company
US -
Cargill
Koch Industries
Bechtel
Publix
Pilot Corp
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu
Hearst Corporation
Cox Enterprises
S. C. Johnson
McWane
Carlson Companies
Mars
Europe -
KPMG
Ernst & Young
PricewaterhouseCoopers
IKEA
Trafigura
J C Bamford Excavators (JCB)
Lidl
Aldi
LEGO
Bosch
Rolex
Ferrero
Bertelsmann
Victorinox
Other -
Luxgen (Taiwan)
Meizu (China)
JXD (China)
>>> Bechtel Corporation
Privately held company
Industry Construction
Founded 1898; 120 years ago
Founder Warren A. Bechtel
Headquarters Blue Shield of California Building
San Francisco, California, U.S.
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
Brendan Bechtel, CEO and Chairman
Revenue $32.9 bn (2017)[1][2]
Owner Bechtel family
Number of employees
50,000 (2017)[1]
Divisions -
Infrastructure
Mining & Metals
Nuclear, Security & Environmental
Oil, Gas & Chemicals
Website bechtel.com
Bechtel Corporation (Bechtel Group, Inc.) is an engineering, procurement, construction, and project management company.[3][4] It is the largest construction company in the United States[5] and the 8th-largest privately owned American company in 2017.[6] Its headquarters are in the South of Market, San Francisco.[7]
Founding and early years
Bechtel's business activities began in 1898 when cattle farmer Warren A. Bechtel moved from Peabody, Kansas, to the Oklahoma Territory to construct railroads with his own team of mules.[8][9] Bechtel moved his family frequently between construction sites around the western United States for the next several years, eventually moving to Oakland, California in 1904, where he worked as the superintendent on the Western Pacific Railroad.[8] In 1906, W. A. Bechtel won his first subcontract to build part of the Oroville-to-Oakland section of the Western Pacific Railroad.[8] That same year, he bought his own steam shovel, becoming a pioneer of the new technology.[10][11] He painted "W.A. Bechtel Co." on the side of the steam shovel, effectively establishing Bechtel as a company, though it was not yet incorporated.[9] Bechtel completed work on a series of railroad contracts during the early 1900s, culminating in an extension of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad finished in 1914.[8]
Starting with the construction of Klamath River Highway in California in 1919, Bechtel ventured into jobs outside of building railroads. The company built roads, bridges, and highways throughout the western United States. The company worked on its first hydroelectric projects in the 1920s for Pacific Gas and Electric Company in California.[10][11][12]
In 1925, Warren, his sons Warren Jr, Stephen, Kenneth (Ken), and his brother Arthur (Art) joined him to incorporate as W.A. Bechtel Company,[13] which by this time was the leading construction company in the western United States.[8][14] In 1929, Warren's son, Stephen, urged his father to take on the company's first pipeline project. Bechtel began working with California Standard Oil Company to build pipelines and refineries.[12][15][16]
In January 1931, Bechtel joined other contractors in the west to form Six Companies, Inc., a consortium created to bid for a contract from the US government to construct the Hoover Dam. Six Companies won the bid in March and construction on the dam began in the summer of 1931.[9][10]
<<<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechtel
>>> Cargill, Incorporated
Private
Industry Conglomerate
Founded 1865; 153 years ago
Founder William Wallace Cargill
Headquarters Minnetonka, Minnesota, U.S.
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
Dave MacLennan
(Chairman and CEO)
Products Agricultural services, crop and livestock, food, health and pharmaceutical, industrial & financial risk management, raw materials
Revenue Increase US$114.695 billion (2018)[1]
Operating income
Increase US$3.204 billion (2018)[1]
Net income
Increase US$3.103 billion (2018)[1]
Total assets Increase US$59.475 billion (2018)[1]
Owner Cargill family (90%)
Number of employees
150,001 (2018)[1]
Website www.cargill.com
Cargill, Incorporated is an American privately held[2][3] global corporation based in Minnetonka, Minnesota, and incorporated in Wilmington, Delaware.[4] Founded in 1865, it is the largest privately held corporation in the United States in terms of revenue.[5] If it were a public company, it would rank, as of 2015, number 15 on the Fortune 500, behind McKesson and ahead of AT&T.[6]
Some of Cargill's major businesses are trading, purchasing and distributing grain and other agricultural commodities, such as palm oil; trading in energy, steel and transport; the raising of livestock and production of feed; and producing food ingredients such as starch and glucose syrup, vegetable oils and fats for application in processed foods and industrial use. Cargill also has a large financial services arm, which manages financial risks in the commodity markets for the company. In 2003, it split off a portion of its financial operations into Black River Asset Management, a hedge fund with about $10 billion of assets and liabilities. It owned 2/3 of the shares of The Mosaic Company (sold off in 2011), one of the world's leading producers and marketers of concentrated phosphate and potash crop nutrients.
Cargill declared revenues of $136.7 billion and earnings of $2.31 billion in the 2013 fiscal year.[7] Employing over 155,000 employees in 66 countries,[8] it is responsible for 25% of all United States grain exports. The company also supplies about 22% of the US domestic meat market, importing more product from Argentina than any other company, and is the largest poultry producer in Thailand. All the eggs used in US McDonald's restaurants pass through Cargill's plants. It is the only US producer of Alberger process salt, which is used in the fast-food and prepared food industries.
Cargill remains a family-owned business, as the descendants of the founder (from the Cargill and MacMillan families) own over 90% of it.[9] As a result, most of its growth has been due to reinvestment of the company's own earnings rather than public financing. Gregory R. Page succeeded former CEO Warren Staley in mid-2007, as Staley reached Cargill's mandatory retirement age of 65, and was CEO and chairman until 2013, when he in turn was succeeded by Dave MacLennan.
<<<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill
>>> Koch Industries, Inc.
Private
Industry Conglomerate
Founded 1940; 78 years ago
Founder Fred C. Koch
Headquarters Wichita, Kansas, U.S.
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
Charles Koch
(Chairman & CEO)
David Koch
(Executive VP)
Products Asphalt, chemicals, commodities trading, energy, fibers, fertilizers, finance, minerals, natural gas, plastics, petroleum, pulp and paper, ranching[1]
Revenue Increase US$115 billion (2017)[2][1]
Owner Charles Koch (42%)
David Koch (42%)
Trusts for the benefit of Elaine Tettemer Marshall, Preston Marshall, and E. Pierce Marshall Jr. (16%)[3]
Number of employees
120,000 (2017)[2][1]
Subsidiaries Georgia-Pacific, Guardian Industries, Flint Hills Resources, Invista, Molex
Website www.kochind.com
Koch Industries, Inc. /ko?k/ is an American multinational corporation based in Wichita, Kansas. Its subsidiaries are involved in the manufacturing, refining, and distribution of petroleum, chemicals, energy, fiber, intermediates and polymers, minerals, fertilizers, pulp and paper, chemical technology equipment, ranching, finance, commodities trading, and investing. Koch owns Invista, Georgia-Pacific, Molex, Flint Hills Resources, Koch Pipeline, Koch Fertilizer, Koch Minerals, Matador Cattle Company, and Guardian Industries. The firm employs 120,000 people in 60 countries, with about half of its business in the United States.[1][2] The company is the largest landowner in the Athabasca oil sands.[4]
The company is the second largest privately held company in the United States after Cargill, with annual revenue of $115 billion.[5][6][7][8] In 2007, it was ranked as the largest privately held company.[9] If Koch Industries had been a public company in 2013, it would have ranked 17th in the Fortune 500.[10]
The company was founded by its namesake, Fred C. Koch, in 1940 after he developed an innovative crude oil refining process.[11] Fred C. Koch died in 1967 and his majority interest in the company was split amongst his four sons. In June 1983, after a bitter legal and boardroom battle, the stakes of Frederick R. Koch and William "Bill" Koch were bought out for $1.1 billion and Charles Koch and David Koch became majority owners in the company.[12] Charles and David Koch each own 42% of the company and trusts for the benefit of Elaine Tettemer Marshall, the daughter in-law of J. Howard Marshall and Anna Nicole Smith, and her children, Preston Marshall and E. Pierce Marshall Jr., own 16% of the company.[3][13]
The company has used its freedom from the pressures of public markets to make long term bets and Charles Koch has stated that the company would go public "over my dead body".[14][15]
<<<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Industries
>>> Uber Technologies Inc.
Private
Industry
Transportation,
delivery (commerce)
Founded March 2009; 9 years ago
Founders Travis Kalanick
Garrett Camp
Headquarters San Francisco, California, United States
Area served
Worldwide, 785 metropolitan areas[1]
Key people
Ronald Sugar (Chairman)
Dara Khosrowshahi (CEO)
Nelson Chai (CFO)
Thuan Pham (CTO)
Products Mobile app, website
Services
Vehicle for hire
Delivery (commerce)
Revenue Increase US$6.5 billion (2016)[2]
Net income
Decrease -US$2.8 billion(2016)[2]
Total assets
Increase US$15.7 billion (2016)
Decrease US$15.3 billion (2017)
Number of employees
12,000+[3]
Uber Technologies Inc. (doing business as Uber) is a peer-to-peer ridesharing, taxi cab, food delivery, bicycle-sharing, and transportation network company (TNC) headquartered in San Francisco, California, with operations in 785 metropolitan areas worldwide.[1] Its platforms can be accessed via its websites and mobile apps. Uber has been prominent in the sharing economy, so much so that the changes in industries as a result of it have been referred to as Uberisation.[4][5][6]
Uber has also been the subject of protests and legal actions, including a criminal investigation for its use, until March 2017, of Greyball software to avoid giving rides to regulators. The name "Uber" is a reference to the common (and somewhat colloquial) word uber, meaning "topmost" or "super", and having its origins in the German word über, cognate with over, meaning "above".[7]
<<<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber
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