Technology

Self-driving car startup Nuro is ready to put autonomous vehicles on the road in partnership with Kroger to deliver groceries in Scottsdale, Arizona.This comes a couple of months after Nuro and Kroger announced their partnership to offer same-day deliveries.

This pilot will serve a single FryFood and Drug location in Scottsdale starting today. Customers can shop for groceries and place either same- or next-day delivery orders via the grocerwebsite or mobile app. Thereno minimum order but there is a flat delivery fee of $5.95.

&We&re proud to contribute and turn our vision for local commerce into a real, accessible service that residents of Scottsdale can use immediately,& Nuro CEO Dave Ferguson said in a statement. &Our goal is to save people time, while operating safely and learning how we can further improve the experience.&

Nurointent is to use its self-driving technology in the last mile for the delivery of local goods and services. That could be things like groceries, dry cleaning, an item you left at a friendhouse or really anything within city limits that can fit inside one of Nurovehicles. Nuro has two compartments that can fit up to six grocery bags each.

In Scottsdale, however, Nuro will initially use Toyota Prius cars before introducing its custom self-driving vehicles. Thatbecause the main purpose of this pilot is to learn, and using the Prius self-driving fleet can help to accelerate those learnings, a Nuro spokesperson told TechCrunch.

&The Priuses share many software and hardware systems with the R1 custom vehicle, so while we compete final certification and testing of the R1, the Prius will begin delivering groceries and help us improve the overall service and customer experience,& the spokesperson said.

When it came to going to market, Ferguson previously told me groceries were most exciting to him. And Kroger particularly stood out because of its smart shelf technology and partnership with Ocado aroundautomated fulfillment centers.

&With the pilot, we&re excited about getting more experience interacting with real customers and understanding exactly what they want,& Ferguson told me. &The things they love about it, the things they don&t love as much. As an organization for us, italso very valuable for us to have to exercise our operational muscle.&

Throughout the pilot program, Nuro will be looking to see how accurate its estimated delivery times are, how the public reacts to the vehicles and how regular, basic cars interact with self-driving ones.

Pantera Capital, a San Francisco firm that has made its mark in recent years by investing early and often in a wide variety of digital assets, is looking to raise up to $175 million for its third venture fund — an enormous jump from the $25 million it deployed for its second venture fund and its $13 million debut venture fund, which it closed in 2013.

Firm partner Paul Veradittakit says the target amount is a &function of how fast the space is moving, the talent coming in, the opportunities, and the sizing of rounds. With more interesting later-stage investments [on our radar], too, we want to be flexible and able to move with the market.&

Whether the firm closes with $175 million or another number is an open question. A newly processedSEC filingshows it has so far rounded up more than $71 million in capital commitments from 90 investors, an amount that Veradittakit calls a first close.

Certainly, Pantera is accustomed to managing meaningful sums of money. In addition to its venture funds, which are structured like most traditional venture funds — they feature a 10-year investing period, similar economics, and involve good old-fashioned checks to startups in exchange for some amount of equity — the firm is also juggling three other strategies.

As we reported last year, one of its newest funds is a hedge fund thatfocused exclusively on initial coin offerings. As firm founder Dan Morehead told us at the time, Pantera buys pre-sale ICOs, &basically getting a discount to the ICO price by getting in early, when itjust a team and a white paper.& Meanwhile, Morehead had added, &We help provide the right connections, whether in terms of marketing or recruiting or business development.

The vehicle is evergreen, says Veradittakit, meaning it has an indefinite fund life that lets investors come and go.

The other two other funds that Pantera currently oversees are also structured like hedge funds. One is a Bitcoin fund that has attracted plenty of investors over the years, and returned a lot to them, too, according to the calculations of Morehead. In fact, he wrote two weeks ago that the fund, launched five years ago, has enjoyed a lifetime return of 10,136.15 percent net of fees and expenses.

The very last fund invests in cryptocurrencies that are already trading on exchanges — an approach that includes machine learning to algorithmically invest in crypotcurrencies, as well as allows for some discretionary input by Panteratop brass, which includes Morehead,Veradittakit, and Joey Krug, who joined Pantera last year after cofounding the market forecasting startup Augur. (It went on to orchestrate the first ICO on the ethereum network.)

Explains Veradittakit of this last pool, itfor &if you are&t sure that Bitcoin will remain the dominant cryptocurrency, or you&re interested in other use cases that may arise, or you just want to build a diversified portfolio of assets that have asymmetrical returns as bitcoin, or maybe return even more because they feature lower valuations.&

In some ways, the venture efforts of Pantera — which employs 38 people altogether in San Francisco and Menlo Park, Ca. — may be its most challenging given the nature of VC. Investors in the asset class are typically willing to wait a handful of years for a firm to produce returns; in Panteracase, because it is bettingexclusively on ventures, tokens, and projects related to blockchain tech, digital currency, and crypto assets, some of those returns could potentially take even longer.

Veradittakit doesn&t sound concerned. Rattling off some of Panteraventure investments to date, including inBitStamp, Xapo, Ripple, and Circle, not to mention more recent investments in Chain, Abra, Veem Polychain, and Z Cash, he sounds more like a proud parent. Pantera has invested in &lotsof wallets and exchanges focused around the world, in Coinbases of different geographies, in enterprise-related blockchain companies. More recently, we&ve funded everything from big data to decentralized application platforms.&

Itstill very early days, he acknowledges. But &in terms of returns, there will be companies that create something completely disruptive. There will be M-A [opportunities] more often and that [come together] more quickly than other companies.&

If everything goes as planned, Pantera will be there when they do, and it will have more resources to deploy than ever.

Messaging company Line is continuing to burrow deep into the crypto space after it announced the launch of a $10 million investment fund.

The fund will be operated by LineKorea-based blockchain subsidiaryUnblock Corporation, which is tasked with research, education and other blockchain-related services. The fund will be called Unblock Ventures and it&ll initially have a capital pool of $10 million but Line said that is likely to increase over time.

The company said the fund will be focused on early-stage startup investments, but it didn&t provide further details.

Line is listed in Tokyo and on the NYSE. This fund makes it one of the first publicly traded companies to createa dedicated crypto investment vehicle. The objective,it said, is &to boost the development and adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.&

Line claims nearly 200 million users of its messaging app, which is particularly popular in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia. The company also offers a range of connected services that include payment, social games, ride-hailing, food delivery and more.

This marks Linesecond major crypto move this year following the launch of its BitBox exchange last month. It isn&t available in the U.S. or Japan right now but Line envisages closes ties with its messaging service and other features further down the line.

These moves into crypto come despite some serious downturn in the valuation of the space this year following record highs in January which saw the value of one Bitcoin touch nearly $20,000 and Ethereum, among others, surged. In the months since then, however, many cryptocurrencies have seen their valuations decline. This week, Ethereum dropped below $300 in what is its first major price crisis. Bitcoin has, for many years, risen and fallen although Januaryvaluations took the extremes to a new level.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.