Technology

As much as we&d all like to believe that our houses are built with perfectly square angles and other highly regular measurements, thatrarely the case — which makes remodeling complex and tedious. ShapeMeasure hopes to alleviate that pain with a device that automatically measures a space and a robotic mill that cuts the required lumber precisely to size, shortening and easing the process by huge amounts.

Founder Ben Blumer, who was exposed to the art of building and repair early by his father, a general contractor, had a brainwave that became the company during some renovations of his own.

&I was shocked to see our flooring installer, who had 10 years of experience, and was excellent at what he did, take over an hour to install a single stair,& Blumer said. &I started thinking, ‘a little bit of technology could go a long way here.& &

Finding himself at the time free to work on such a project, he recruited a former general contractor friend and applied to HAX, which soon shipped them off to Shenzhen to pursue their idea.

The main issue is stairs: they&re tricky, and especially in older homes can be pretty off-kilter. So although you know each stair is about 35 inches wide, it might be 35 and 3/64 inches, while the next one could be 34 and 61/64. Likewise, the angles might be ever so slightly off the 90 degrees or whatever they theoretically should be. Painstakingly measuring every single stair and manually cutting wood to those many slightly different dimensions is extremely time-consuming. The tool ShapeMeasure built makes it literally a push-button affair.

The device they settled on is essentially a super-precise lidar that measures around itself in wide arc, and the exact details of which comprise part of the companysecret sauce. This gives the precise dimensions and attachment angles of the area around it, in the first intended use case a stair. The design, helped along by HAXNoel Joyce, looks a bit like a giant Dust Buster by way of the original &Alien.&

Obviously his shirt contradicts my headline, but if you think about the cutting as an automated process rather than something a person has to do, mine makes sense.

&We were working with Noel Joyce, HAXlead industrial designer. We wanted a product that looked and felt like a tool. We figured, if you&re trying to convince contractors to try something new, it should feel familiar,& Blumer said. &We spent hundreds of hours sourcing parts and re-engineering our scanning mechanism so that it could fit into Noelbeautiful form factor. Turns out, contractors don&t care what it looks like. They liked the design, but were way more excited for the functionality.&

Once the shapes are scanned in and checked, that information can be beamed off to ShapeMeasureother device, a robotic lumber sizing system that cuts wood into the exact size and shape necessary to fit together as stairs. Of course, the contractor still has to bring them to the location and attach them by whatever means they see fit, but what was once a process with perhaps hundreds of steps has been simplified by an order of magnitude.

The machine is similar to other lumber-cutting devices, but simpler and easier to operate.

&There are lots of automatic cutting systems — often big, heavy, expensive and operated by professional CNC technicians. To cut flooring on a machine like that involves setting up jigs, clamping and reclamping each board, and generating custom gcode for each stair we cut,& Blumer said. They can be several times more costly and difficult to employ. &The cutting solution we&re building is compact, requires no clamping, and can be operated with just a few hours of training.&

Itnot just about length and width, either — molding and other flourishes on the stairs can make complex cuts necessary that would be impractical or at the very least extremely time-consuming to attempt manually.

Examples of complex cuts made by the ShapeMeasure machine.

The result is that the installation process from start to finish is about four times faster, they determined. If this seems a bit optimistic, know that it isn&t just armchair theorizing — they were careful to back up these numbers from the start.

&We take our speedup data really seriously,& said Blumer. &This is our top metric! One of the first purchases I made for the company was a dozen stopwatches. We&ve done installations in the ShapeMeasure lab and on real, messy construction sites — filming, timing and logging every moment.&

Interestingly, the precut lumber made other improvements possible — the team designed a bucket to accommodate the increased rate at which the installer uses glue and other parts. Ita bit like if you improved painting speed so much that your new bottleneck was mixing and pouring the paint into roller trays fast enough.

Currently the company is working on establishing standard practices and packaging so that a ShapeMeasure µfactory& can be set up easily anywhere in the country on short notice. And they&re &considering& raising money before then to accelerate the process. Blumer built the prototype with his own money and they pulled in a bit from HAX and then a small pre-seed round to get things started.

With luck and a bit of elbow grease, ShapeMeasure could turn out to be a real differentiator in the contractor space — every hour counts, as does every dollar in an estimate.

Eagle-eyed readers will recall that we mentioned M1 Finance earlier today in our look at a few trends in the fintech industry. We&re back with the firm this afternoon as it has a bit of news thatworth discussing.

Chicago-based M1 Finance announced today that it has reached the $1 billion assets under management mark, or AUM. Reaching AUM thresholds provides useful milestones that we can use to track the progress of various players in the fintech and finservices worlds.

M1 is an interesting company, bringing together a number of products to form a single platform. Its hybrid nature makes comparing its AUM to other companies& histories a bit dicey. Still, for reference, Wealthfront, a roboadvisor, announced that it started 2013 with AUM of $100 million, and closed that year with $538 million. By mid-2014, Wealthfront had $1 billion AUM. Today it has over $20 billion.

So, the numbers matter, and reaching thresholds can help us understand where a company is in its maturity cycle.

Lettalk about M1 Finance AUM growth, its revenue growth and its product model. Ita neat company with a history of efficient growth.

Growth, product

We&ll start with product, as how the company approaches its feature-set helps explain how the service is priced, which in turn helps us grok the companygrowth.

M1 is not a roboadvisor, or a simple neobank, or a lending product; itall three at once, providing effectively the digital equivalent of a full-service bank, admittedly in the form of an online experience instead of a brick-and-mortar outlet. M1 users can open investment accounts, checking accounts, get a debit card and borrow money against their investment portfolios; ita cohesive feature set.

And one that lets M1 price its products lower as a group than it could individually. During a call with M1CEO Brian Barnes about the companyAUM milestone, the executive connected the companylong-term vision to its ability to price aggressively. (All fintechs are expanding their platforms, itworth noting, meaning that, in time, nearly every fintech player will offer an array of services; Wealthfront, famous for its work in roboadvising, now also offers savings and borrowing capabilities.)

Barnes said that M1 has long wanted to &manage the bulk of [its users&] financial assets, not create a sort of low-friction acquisition hook& to bring in smaller-dollar accounts. This, in turn, means that M1 can have higher per-user sums on its books, which, it appears, helped the company reduce prices on a per-product basis.

HereBarnes connecting per-account totals to pricing:

Managing more of someonefinancial assets, and financial life, is going to be more economical. What it allows us to do is maintain lower margins per product, but have enough margin on the entire financial relationship that we can build a very sustainable durable, long-lasting business.

Thatneat! And folks with lots of money expect low fees, especially in the Robinhood-era, so the setup probably helps with attracting users.

Revenue

Summing so far, M1 runs a broad set of financial products, attracting more dollars-per-user than other companies, perhaps, which lets it charge, in its view, lower prices.

How low? Barnes told TechCrunch that his company is &building [its] business model to make 1% of assets we manage [into] top line. So every billion bucks on the platform will be 10 million dollars in recurring revenue. And it is a relatively linear relationship.& The CEO later extended the point, saying that when his firm has $10 billion in AUM, it will generate $100 million.

This means that as M1 scales, we&ll be able to know with reasonable confidence how much revenue itdriving.

The company charges in the manner you&d expect, with incomes from loaning money, interchange and a SaaS-product called M1 Plus that lowers some fees and provides interest on checking accounts, costing $125 yearly.

Now that M1 is big enough to matter, it has to double, and then double again. We&ll know how well thatgoing based on how quickly the company reaches the $2 billion mark.

When it comes to the so-called &consumerization of the enterprise,& a workplace tool that looks an awful lot like Pinterest seems like it would be the trendfinal form. Brooklyn-based Air is building a digital asset manager for communications teams that aren&t satisfied with more general cloud storage options and want something that can show off visual files with a bit more pizzazz.

The startup tells TechCrunch that they have closed $6 million in funding led by Lerer Hippeau . RedSea Ventures, Advancit Capital and WndrCo also participated.

General-purpose cloud storage options from Google or Dropbox don&t always handle digital assets well — especially when it comes to previewing items, and Airmore focused digital asset management competitors often require dedicated managers inside the org, the company says. Air has a pretty straightforward interface that looks more like a desktop site from Facebook or Pinterest, with a focus on thumbnails and video previews thatsimple and sleek.

Air is trying to capitalize on the trend toward greater à la carte software spend for teams looking to phase in products with very specific toolsets. The team is generally charging $10 per user per month, with 100GB of storage included.

&Adobe is an amazing suite of products, but with the idea that companies are mandating the tools that their employees use versus letting their employees choose — it makes a lot of sense that teams are going to ultimately end up having more autonomy and creating better work when they&re using tools that they care about,& Lerer Hippeau managing partner Ben Lerer tells TechCrunch.

Air lets customers migrate files from Dropbox or Google Drive to its AWS-hosted storage platform, which displays files like photos, videos, PDFs, fonts and other visual assets as Pinterest-esque boards. The app is a way to view and store files, but Airplatform play focuses pretty heavily on giving co-workers the ability to comment and tag assets. Collaborating around files is a pretty easy sell; a couple of users discussing which photo they like best for a particular marketing campaign doesn&t require too much imagination.

The team has been focusing largely on attracting users in roles like brand marketing managers, content coordinators and social media managers as a way of infiltrating and scaling vertically inside marketing departments.

&What Airtable did to spreadsheets and what Notion did to docs, we&re doing for visual work,& CEO Shane Hegde told TechCrunch in an interview. &As we think about how we differentiate, itreally that we&re a workspace collaboration tool, we&re not just cloud storage or digital asset management…&

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, then start. Sound familiar? The Konami Code, as this sequence came to be known, is one of the most recognizable artifacts of an earlier era of gaming. Kazuhisa Hashimoto, its creator, has used up the last of his 30 lives.

Hashimoto was a programmer at Konami, and created the code during the development of one of Konamibest-known games of the 8-bit era: Gradius. Anyone who played it will remember the crushing difficulty of this iconic side-scrolling shooter.

Even the developers, it turns out, found it a bit of a hassle to get through repeatedly for testing purposes. Thatwhy during the porting process from arcade to NES, Hashimoto made himself a bit of a shortcut to make things a bit easier for himself.

He created a special command that would award the player the most crucial items for surviving the gamechallenges. The sequence to activate it needed to be easy for him to remember during his many playthroughs, but extremely unlikely for a player to input by accident. And so he settled on the well-known &up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A& — after which is usually appended &start,& since the code is often entered while paused or at the title screen.

Fate intervened here and the code, which was meant to be removed before the team wrapped up, was forgotten about and ended up in the shipping product. Somehow word got out about the code (who knows how such things transpired in the &80s — probably it was published in Nintendo Power) and, given the extreme difficulty of the game, its necessity led to the code being adopted by pretty much everyone who bought Gradius.

And so millions of kids who grew up in the &80s and &90s learned the Konami Code by heart, though its effects differed from game to game, it generally made things considerably easier. For instance, in the infamous (and still amazing) Contra for NES, the code gives the player 30 lives, which honestly is about the bare minimum necessary to complete that brutal game.

The code persisted for many years and across generations, though it also began to mutate — in Gradius III for SNES the code caused the playership to self-destruct, as if telling them that cheaters never prosper. Even games by other publishers used the code, as a joke or in earnest.

Soon the Konami Code was a staple of geek culture. I myself owned a shirt with the code on it, and listened to a band by that name. It showed up in TV, movies, anywhere an &80s kid had a chance to slip it in. Even if it wasn&t used by name or with the exact sequence, the code became shorthand for all other cheat codes. Hashimoto had unknowingly created a proto-meme that infiltrated gaming culture worldwide, becoming one of the most widely recognizable aspects of it for decades to come.

All because he found his own game too hard to play.

Those were the days when development teams were on the order of 10-20 people, and the choices of a single person could change everything. These days a cheat code would probably have to be approved and playtested during alpha and beta, and shared with strategic partners for the printed strategy guides well ahead of release.

Hashimotocontribution to the gaming world was an accident, but on no account does that downplay his or the codeimportance. He represented the lasting power of an earlier era of gaming and game creation, and accident or not, his legacy is a powerful one.

San Francisco-based startup Particle was one of the rising stars in the Internet of Things space, raising more than $81 million to date on the promise of helping to manage and secure the next generation of connected devices.

But the company is only now emerging from what its co-founder and chief executive Zach Supalla called a &turbulent period,& prompting layoffs and cost-cutting to help stay afloat, TechCrunch has learned.

Founded in 2012, Particle snagged $40 million in its Series C fundraise last October from big industrial investors, including Qualcomm Ventures and Energy Impact Partners, signaling strong support for the companymission. The startup pitches its flagship platform as an all-in-one solution to manage and secure IoT devices with encryption and security, but also scalability and data autonomy.

But a recent email sent by Supalla to his staff — obtained by TechCrunch — shows the company is course-correcting after a recent revenue miss.

The email, which the company confirmed was sent by the chief executive, said Particle laid off 14 staff members earlier this month, representing about 10% of the company. The layoffs of both engineering and support staff came just weeks after co-founder and chief technology officer Zachary Crockett quietly departed the company for &unrelated& reasons, said Supalla. (Crockett did not respond to a request for comment.)

According to Supallaemail to staff, Particlerevenue goal in 2019 was $16 million, but it ended the year with $10.3 million. Supalla cited, among other things, &operational challenges& with the business that he said kept the company &from executing as well as we could.&

Supalla said the company still has a &flush& bank account with more than $30 million in the bank, but the companycurrent burn rate of $2 million per month is &uncomfortably high.&

&We would only have until early 2021 to prepare for the next stage of financing the company,& he said.

The email added that the company is bringing on $10 million in venture debt, but Supalla told TechCrunch that the deal is &still in progress.& Particle is aiming to reduce its burn rate to about $1.6 million per month, which Supallaemail said would be achievable with the recent layoffs and reducing discretionary budgets, including marketing.

The cost-cutting will &put us in a position of financial strength,& the email said, adding that the company has &no intentions& of further layoffs.

Although the 14 employees have been given severance, one source said that some are still waiting for the payouts — some two weeks after the announcement — which Supalla confirmed in an email. TechCrunch also learned that former staff were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements. Supalla told TechCrunch that these agreements come with non-disparagement clauses, but that anyone laid off that wanted to be released from the non-disparagement terms would be.

Supallaemail is hardly the death knell for the company, but questions remain about its revenue targets and its efforts to reduce its monthly burn rate. The chief executiveemail said, candidly, that while layoffs can signal financial duress, they&re all too often made too late and &as a last resort.&

&Thatnot whathappening here,& said Supalla. &We have plenty of money in the bank and are making prudent cuts to strengthen the business.&

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Cartesiam, a startup that aims to bring machine learning to edge devices powered by microcontrollers, has launched a new tool for developers who want an easier way to build services for these devices. The new NanoEdge AI Studio is the first IDE specifically designed for enabling machine learning and inferencing on Arm Cortex-M microcontrollers, which power billions of devices already.

As Cartesiam GM Marc Dupaquier, who co-founded the company in 2016, told me, the company works very closely with Arm, given that both have a vested interest in having developers create new features for these devices. He noted that while the first wave of IoT was all about sending data to the cloud, that has now shifted and most companies now want to limit the amount of data they send out and do a lot more on the device itself. And thatpretty much one of the founding theses of Cartesiam. &Itjust absurd to send all this data — which, by the way, also exposes the device from a security standpoint,& he said. &What if we could do it much closer to the device itself?&

The company first bet on Intelshort-lived Curie SoC platform. That obviously didn&t work out all that well, given that Intel axed support for Curie in 2017. Since then, Cartesiam has focused on the Cortex-M platform, which worked out for the better, given how ubiquitous it has become. Since we&re talking about low-powered microcontrollers, though, itworth noting that we&re not talking about face recognition or natural language understanding here. Instead, using machine learning on these devices is more about making objects a little bit smarter and, especially in an industrial use case, detecting abnormalities or figuring out when ittime to do preventive maintenance.

Today, Cartesiam already works with many large corporations that build Cortex-M-based devices. The NanoEdge Studio makes this development work far easier, though. &Developing a smart object must be simple, rapid and affordable — and today, it is not, so we are trying to change it,& said Dupaquier. But the company isn&t trying to pitch its product to data scientists, he stressed. &Our target is not the data scientists. We are actually not smart enough for that. But we are unbelievably smart for the embedded designer. We will resolve 99% of their problems.& He argues that Cartesiam reduced time to market by a factor of 20 to 50, &because you can get your solution running in days, not in multiple years.&

One nifty feature of the NanoEdge Studio is that it automatically tries to find the best algorithm for a given combination of sensors and use cases and the libraries it generates are extremely small and use somewhere between 4K to 16K of RAM.

NanoEdge Studio for both Windows and Linux is now generally available. Pricing starts at €690/month for a single user or €2,490/month for teams.