Technology

Nuro, an autonomous vehicle startup focused on local deliveries, has partnered with 135-year-old grocery retailer Kroger to offer same-day deliveries. The two have yet to announce which market this will be live in, but the plan is to launch the several-month-long pilot this fall.

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 friends house 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.

When it came to going to market, Nuro CEO Dave Ferguson told me groceries were most exciting to him. And Kroger particularly stood out because of its smart shelf technology and partnership 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 said. &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.

The pilot will be live in just one market, but Kroger has 2,800 stores nationwide so Nuro sees the partnership as an opportunity to reach the vast majority of America. Kroger already offers same-day delivery to 75 percent of its customers. With Nuro on board, the idea is to deploy the self-driving cars in areas where Kroger has yet to offer delivery services.

&We want to be available to every single customer of ours,& Kroger Chief Digital Officer YaelCosset told TechCrunch.

On the customer side, the experience will surely be different from what they&re used to. Currently, Kroger customers expect the grocery delivery drivers to bring their items to their front door. With Nurovehicles, they&ll only go as far as curbside.

&This is an area where we&re going to learn a lot from the pilot,& Cosset said. &We have theories and assumptions about high density and low density and we want to see how that plays out.&

Cosset went on to describe how he doesn&t see the current model for delivery and autonomous vehicle-powered delivery as mutually exclusive.

&We believe they&re complimentary,& Cosset said. &We may realize the optimal time to use autonomous vehicles is between 10 & 11 in the morning and the rest of the day have a fully-staffed model.&

Down the road, Nuro will continue looking at additional partners for its local delivery ambitions. Although Nuro is excited about the partnership with Kroger, itnot an exclusive one.

&Given we&re a startup, we can&t afford to put our eggs in one basket,& Ferguson said. &But we do have the full intention of going big with Kroger and trying to do as much as we can together.&

Other potential partners for Nuro may include those like local dry cleaners, bakeries and florists.

&I think the only way realistically to do that is to provide a way for customers to access all of these local services through one spot,& Ferguson said. &That way, we&ll be able to collectively provide this local community delivery service and have some way to get all these local businesses within the same experience.&

Zagster, the bike-share company behind the Pace brand, is launching what itcalling Pace Parking. The idea is for it so serve as a parking platform for bikes, electric bikes and electric scooters. Pace is first launching these in Chicago, Austin and Bloomington, Ind., with the plan to launch in additional cities this year.

This parking platform is designed to support dockless lock-to vehicles, like JUMP bikes and Skip scooters. In partnership with cities, private landowners and local businesses, the idea is to make sure communities have proper parking infrastructure.

&With the meteoric rise of dockless bikes, ebikes and scooters in the U.S., our cities are now in the early stages of a massive transformation in how people get around — one as significant as the personal automobile in 20th century,& Zagster CEO Tim Ericson said in a statement. &Imagine a city with tens of thousands of cars and nowhere to park them — this is the huge challenge faced by every major U.S. city right now. Without mobility parking infrastructure, cities have no solution to secure the flood of new vehicles descending upon their streets and sidewalks, and we are the first company to do something about it. As the pioneer of lock-to dockless bike sharing, we&re proud to deliver the first ever universal, secure, smart parking platform for parking not just Pace bikes, but other shared bikes, personal bikes, electric scooters, and future mobility vehicles.&

Earlier this year, Zagster raised a $15 million round led byEdison Capital Partners.The startup has also unveiled its new bike parking system for both shared and personal bikes.

&Bikes have always locked to things,& Zagster CEO Tim Ericson said in a press release. &Cities have been willing to experiment with dockless bikes that don&t lock to anything because they lack sufficient bike parking and, until Pace, lacked a partner willing to install this infrastructure at no cost.&

ZagsterPace is one of the newer entrants to the bike-share space, which consists of a number of startups and larger companies battling for contracts with cities all over the world.

Pace, which launched in December, currently operates in Tallahassee, Florida and Knoxville, Tennessee. With the funding, Zagster plans to launch Pace in additional cities this year. Zagster also operates a bike-share solution for municipalities looking to offer their own city-specific services. Zagster, which launched in 2007,operates more than 200 bike-sharesacross 35 states in the U.S. This move to support multi-modal transportation options likely signals the entrance of yet another electric scooter service.

What does brand loyalty even mean anymore App downloads, points, stars, and other complex reward systems have not just spawned their own media empires trying to decipher them, they have failed at their most basic objective: building a stronger bond between a brand and its consumers.

Bumped wants to reinvent the loyalty space by giving consumers shares of the companies they shop at. Through Bumpedapp, consumers choose their preferred retailer in different categories (think Lowevs The Home Depot in home improvement), and when they spend money at that store using a linked credit card, Bumped will automatically give them ownership in that company.

The startup, which is based in Portland and was founded in March 2017, announced the beta launch of its service today, as well as a $14.1 million series A led by Dan Ciporin at Canaan Partners, along with existing seed investors Peninsula Ventures, Commerce Ventures, and Oregon Venture Partners.

Bumped is a brokerage, and the company told me that it has passed all FINRA and SEC licensing. When consumers spend money at participating retailers, they receive bona fide shares in the companies they shop at. Each retailer determines a loyalty percentage rate, which is a minimum of 1% and can go up to 5%. Bumped then buys shares off the public market to reward consumers, and in cases where it needs to buy fractional shares, it will handle all of those logistics.

Bumpedapp allows users to track their shares

For founder and CEO David Nelsen, the startup doesn&t just make good business sense, it can have a wider social impact of democratizing access to the public equity markets. &A lot of brands need to build an authentic relationship with the customers,& he explained to me. &The brands that have a relationship with consumers, beyond price, are thriving.& With Bumped, Nelsengoal is to &align the interests of a shareholder and consumer, and everybody wins.&

His mission is to engage more Americans into the equity markets and the power of ownership. He notes that far too many people fail to setup their 401k, and don&t invest regularly in the stock market, citing a statistic that only 13.9% of people directly own a share of stock. By offering shares, he hopes that Bumped engages consumers to think about their relationship to companies in a whole new way. As Nelsen put it, &we are talking about bringing a whole new class of shareholders into the market.&

This isn&t the first time that Nelsen has built a company in the loyalty space. He previously was a co-founder and CEO of Giftango, a platform for prepaid digital gift cards that was acquired by InComm in late 2012.

Consumers will have to choose their Bumped loyalty partner in each category, like burgers

That previously experience has helped the company build an extensive roster for launch. Bumped has 19 brands participating in the beta, including Chipotle, Netflix, Shake Shack, Walgreens, and The Home Depot. Another 6 brands are currently papering contracts with the firm.

Ciporin of Canaan said that he wanted to fund something new in the loyalty space. &There has been just a complete lack of innovation in the loyalty space,& he explained to me. &I think about it as Robinhood meets airline points programs.& One major decider for Ciporin in making the investment was academic research, such as this paper by Jaakko Aspara, showing that becoming a shareholder in a company tended to make consumers significantly more loyal to those brands.

In the short run, Bumped heads into a crowded loyalty space that includes companies like Drop, which I have covered before on TechCrunch. Nelsen believes that the stock ownership model is &an entirely different mechanism& in loyalty, and that makes it &hard to compare& to other loyalty platforms.

Longer term, he hints at exploring how to offer this sort of equity loyalty model to small and medium businesses, a significantly more complex challenge given the lack of liquid markets for their equity. Today, the company is exclusively focused on publicly-traded companies.

Bumped today has 14 people, and is targeting a team size of around 20 employees.